Numerical modelling of PCB planar inductors: impact of 3D modelling on high‐frequency copper loss evaluation

Abstract

Loss values are key parameters for designing high performance high frequency (HF) magnetic components for power electronics (PE) converters. With the increase of PE switching frequencies, copper losses have to be precisely quantified, ideally until some megahertz. In the literature, many 2D numerical simulations based on finite element analysis (FEA) are performed for such computations. 3D FEA studies of planar components are still limited because of modeling problems, computational resources and computing time. In this paper, quantitative comparisons between 2D and 3D simulation results for planar inductors are achieved focusing on copper loss computation. Results are compared in terms of simulation performances and accuracy. The aim of the paper is to highlight benefits of 2D and 3D FEA simulations in order to choose the appropriate model according to the studied problem.

A Comprehensive Review on Planar Magnetics and the Structures to Reduce the Parasitic Elements and Improve Efficiency

“…Several different approaches have been introduced to model the behaviors of planar transformers. For electromagnetic analysis, FEA models [11,[39][40][41][42][43][44][45][46][47][48] of the device provide accurate results compared to experiments [39,47] and reveal the detailed distributions of magnetic fields produced by the transformer. Another use of FEA is to obtain the parameters that are used in circuit models introduced in the previous section.…”

2-D Winding Losses Calculation for Round Conductor Coil

“…The simulations were computed with 16 cores and 500 GB memory [40]. To guarantee the accuracy of computation, the boundary layer mesh is used, and the smallest size of an element is smaller than one-third of skin depth based on analysis in [41]. The 3-D models have 2.6 million elements in case (1) and 1.6 million elements in case (2).…”

Knowledge-aware Artificial Neural Network for Loss Modeling of Planar Magnetic Components

“…3D FEM simulations have been widely employed to estimate winding loss. Although 2D FEM simulations have a faster speed, the precision of 2D FEM is much lower than that of 3D FEM due to windings outside of magnetic cores [27]. Therefore, 3D FEM simulation is carried out in the software CST Studio to provide accurate measured data for the winding loss modeling in this paper.…”