Dynamic characteristics testing and modeling in electromagnetic-thermal-force coupling of electromagnetic devices using parallel finite element simulation

Electromagnetic systems of Electromagnetic devices involve multiphysics coupling of electromagnetic fields, electrical circuits, mechanical motion, and temperature fields. When the digital prototype model has a large number of meshes, the commercial finite element software also has the disadvantage of long computation time in the simulation of dynamic characteristics of electrical apparatus. This paper proposes a transmission line method (TLM) based digital modeling method for the electromagnetic-thermal-force coupling to test and evaluate the static and dynamic characteristics of electromagnetic devices more accurately and efficiently. The case study is developed on a direct current (DC) contactor, and the dynamic characteristics testing and modeling in the electromagnetic-thermal-force coupling of the contactor are investigated. The numerical results of the finite element method (FEM) model for the electromagnetic system of the contactor are compared with the commercial FEM software Altair Flux and the experimental results, which demonstrate the exceptional accuracy of the proposed digital modeling method for the multiphysics coupling of the DC contactor. Meanwhile, the dynamic characteristics of the DC contactor at different ambient temperatures are measured and evaluated, and the comparison with the experimental measurements shows the applicability of the proposed digital prototype model at different ambient temperatures. Compared with the conventional Newton-Raphson (NR) iteration, when dividing fine mesh and extremely fine mesh, the TLM parallel computing significantly improves the efficiency of solving the dynamic characteristics of multiphysics coupling by about 35 % and 44 % with the same computational accuracy, respectively. The dynamic characteristics evaluation method combined with digital modeling technology and experimental measurements proposed in this paper demonstrates high accuracy and solving efficiency, making a notable contribution to the field of design and optimization of electromagnetic devices. © 2024 Elsevier Ltd