An Efficient Harmonic Balance Method for Nonlinear Eddy-Current Problems

A method is presented which determines the steady-state solution of nonlinear eddy current problems. The unknown potentials are represented by Fourier-series and the nonlinear behavior of the material is split into a linear and a nonlinear term using a fixed-point technique. This approach leads to decoupled linear equations for each harmonic component. To take the nonlinearity into account, several fixed-point iterations have to be made. The method avoids calculating transient processes which normally have to be stepped through if using time-stepping methods. The present method is illustrated by two 2-D examples.