Magnet finite elements analysis

[krubi]

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 homogeneous (B-field distribution (static)) , the inductance has a desired magnitude and the heat dissipation of the whole design doesn´t exceed a certain treshold.

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 markets which offer 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 this would definitely go far beyond the available budget.

Thanks for any help.

Best regards
Steph

 

[CharlieM80]

Though I haven't used them, I was pretty impressed by these guys when I was looking into something similar:

http://www.fieldp.com

In particular, check out the downloadable textbooks and freeware 2D & 3D programs under educational resources. You can also get 30 day trials of their commercial programs (a feature also available from most vendors ... definitely try-before-you-buy!)

You can't really expect an answer for 'what is best in my case ...' questions. You can do this on your desktop though, and won't need a cluster.

 

[Brad1979]

You can do magnetic and heat flow problems with FEMM (

http://www.femm.info/wiki/HomePage

). You can only use it for 2D or axisymmetric problems (which, if your design is cylindrical, may be what you need). Plus it is open source, so you can download it for free.