General Integral Formulation of Magnetic Flux Computation and Its Application to Inductive Power Transfer System

An accurate and fast post-processing method for computing the magnetic flux through a coil is discussed and applied to the analysis of inductive power transfer (IPT) systems. This post-processing method is well adapted to various numerical methods. In this paper, a volume integral method based on magnetic vector potential interpolation is focused to solve the computational magnetostatic problem for the field quantities. It does not require the discretization of the predominant air domain, so is perfectly suited for the modeling of IPT couplers. In magnetostatic analysis, the magnetic flux is expressed as a summation of two terms. The first one is created by source coils and is computed by integral expressions. The second one is obtained by a light integration only on the magnetic region. The method is accurate and associated with a reduced computation time. It is compared with both finite-element method and experimental results to check its performance.