Magnet FE analysis

krubi · Apr 12, 2011

Hello,
I am pretty new here and hope that some of you can help me.

I am at the beginning of a new project. One of the first steps will be the design and verification of a magnet which has a cylindrical shape and a complicated geometrical cutout. Before the fabrication of this magnet, I would like to assure that the magnetic field in the center is more or less homogenous (B-field distribution (static)), the inductance has a desired magnitude and the heat dissipation of the whole design doesn’t exceed a certain threshold.

The idea is to use the powerful FE-Method to obtain all the information listed above and to gain experience for future tasks. There are various commercial programs available on the market which offers solutions for electromagnetism problems like the products of Ansys (Ansys 13, Maxwell 14), Comsol (Multiphysics (I don’t know exactly)), Cobham (Opera-3d).

For the computing process I’d like to use a desktop PC which was designed for former computation tasks (Intel Core i7 950 3.06GHz 8M LGA 1366, 16GB DDR3 1333MHz RAM, moderate graphic card).

Due to the fact, that I have no experience on FEM my questions are:

1. Is one of these programs listed above, or another one, capable to solve the described problem?

2. If yes, which one should be the best in my case (concerning computer hardware, accuracy/reliability)?

3. Is the computer hardware sufficient to handle the task or should I try to get access on a cluster system (recommended by Ansys for example)?

Since these programs, the licenses respectively are very expensive I would like to clarify the questions before spending money in licenses and/or computer hardware.

I talked once with someone about one of these Ansys programs. He told me, in order to use a quadcore processor, 4 Ansys licenses are necessary to ensure the full hardware potential (each license for one core). Is that true? Because then it would go definitely far beyond the available budget.

Thanks for any help.

Best regards
Steph

biff44 · Apr 14, 2011

All good programs. There are also lower frequency programs for magnets and MRI machines that might be of use.

Computer sounds good enough. I would suggest a 64 bit operating system, like Windows 7 Professional. Also a really good graphics card will help.

I have been looking around for a new computer myself, and you might want to look at some of the cyberpower systems. They can do an overclocked i7 2600K with water cooling and fast memory sticks that probably runs like your own personal supercomputer! And all for relatively cheap bux (compared to what a seat of a good emag analysis program will cost)!

Just, wherever you buy the computer, make sure it is the new rev of the support chipset. Intel had a recent product recall on their i7 chipset--something about the Sata II ports.

http://www.MaguffinMicrowave.com