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Litz Wire Homogenization with COMSOL and MATLAB

Thomas Guillod, ETH Zurich, Power Electronic Systems Laboratory

This COMSOL and MATLAB tool extracts homogenized material parameters for a litz wire.
This means that a complex litz wire, which is composed of many strands, can be replaced with a homogeneous material.
This virtual material parameters are defined such that the energy and losses matches the stranded litz wire.
More concretely, a virtual complex permeability and complex conductivity are extracted.

The method features several advantages:
* A reduced computational cost, since the discrete strands are not modeled
* The mesh can be coarse, independent of the skin depth
* Method valid up to several megahertz
* The litz wire can feature an arbitrary shape
* The impact of the eddy current on the magnetic field is considered

The following limitations exist:
* The litz wire is composed of round strands
* The litz wire is ideal (insulated and perfectly twisted strands)
* The litz wire is defined with a fill factor, the exact position of the strands is not considered

This tool is developed by the Power Electronic Systems Laboratory at ETH Zurich and is available under the BSD License. The code is also available on the ETH Data Archive.

More information and latest version on:
https://github.com/ethz-pes/litz_wire_homogenization_comsol_matlab

Other Entries by This Contributor

• MATLAB Toolbox for Handling 2D and 3D FEM Meshes
• Litz Wire Losses with FEM and MATLAB

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