Soft magnetic composite materials produced by powder metallurgy techniques can be very useful for construction of low cost small motors. However, the rotational core losses and the corresponding B–H relationships of soft magnetic composite materials with two-dimensional rotating fluxes have neither been supplied by the manufacturers nor reported in the literature. This article reports the core loss measurement of a soft magnetic composite material, SOMALOY™ 500, Höganäs AB, Sweden, under two-dimensional excitations. The principle of measurement, testing system, and power loss calculation are presented. The results are analyzed and discussed.

Soft magnetic composite (SMC) materials are especially suitable for construction of electrical machines with complex structures and three-dimensional (3-D) magnetic fluxes. In the design and optimization of such 3-D flux machines, the 3-D vector magnetic properties of magnetic materials should be properly determined, modeled and applied for accurate calculation of the magnetic field distribution, parameters and performance. This paper presents the measurement of 3-D vector magnetic properties and determination of 3-D reluctivity tensor of SMC. The reluctivity tensor is a key factor for accurate numerical analysis of magnetic field in a 3-D flux SMC motor.

This paper reports the measurement and modelling of magnetic properties of SOMALOY TM 500, a soft magnetic composite (SMC) material, under different 2D vector magnetisations, such as alternating along one direction, circularly and elliptically rotating in a 2D plane. By using a 2D magnetic property tester, the B-H curves and core losses of the SMC material have been measured with different flux density patterns on a single sheet square sample. The measurements can provide useful information for modelling of the magnetic properties, such as core losses. The core loss models have been successfully applied in the design of rotating electrical machines with SMC core.

Nonfused ring electron acceptors (NFREAs) have become a research hotspot of organic solar cells (OSCs) due to their facile synthesis. However, efficient NFREAs not only need to maintain the advantages of FREAs but also need to optimize the molecular structure of the conjugate backbone to achieve good planarity. Therefore, choosing the appropriate building blocks is a prerequisite for achieving efficient OSCs. Here, two simple NFREAs 2T2CSi-4F and 4T2CSi-4F, based on diester-thieno­[3,2-b]­thiophene (2T2C) as the central core unit and 4,4-di-2-ethylhexyl-dithieno­[3,2-b:2′,3′-d]­silole (DTSi) or thieno­[3,2-b]­thiophene (TT) as the conjugated linking unit, were designed and synthesized. The density function theory results manifest that the oxygen atom of the thiophene ester group can form O···S interaction with the sulfur atom. Introducing noncovalent interactions can form multiple intramolecular conformational locks, which greatly enhance the molecular planarity. In addition, 2T2CSi-4F with a symmetrical structure exhibits red-shifted absorption, shallower lowest unoccupied molecular orbital energy levels, and stronger crystallinity than 4T2CSi-4F. Therefore, the PBDB-T:2T2CSi-4F device with favorable molecular packing and morphology achieves a higher power conversion efficiency of 10.04%. Our work demonstrates that the 2T2C unit and multimolecular conformational lock strategy are conducive to the development of efficient NFREAs.

The existing non-paraxial expression of audio sounds generated by a parametric array loudspeaker (pal) is hard to calculate due to the fivefold integral in it. A rigorous solution of the Westervelt equation under the quasilinear approximation is developed in this paper for circular PALs by using the spherical harmonics expansion, which simplifies the expression into a series of threefold summations with uncoupled angular and radial components. The angular component is determined by Legendre polynomials and the radial one is an integral involving spherical Bessel functions, which converge rapidly. Compared to the direct integration over the whole space, the spherical expansion is rigorous, exact, and can be calculated efficiently. The simulations show the proposed expression can obtain the same accurate results with a speed of at least 15 times faster than the existing one.