An optimizing design method for a compact iron shielded superconducting magnet for use in MRI

A method is developed for designing a special iron shielded superconducting magnet for MRI in this paper. The shield is designed as an integral part of the cryostat and high permeability and high saturated magnetization iron material is adopted. This scheme will result in a compact iron shielded magnet. In the presented design, the finite element (FE) method is adopted to calculate the magnetic field produced by superconducting coils and nonlinear iron material. The FE method is incorporated into the simulated annealing method which is employed for corresponding optimization. Therefore, geometrical configurations of both coils and iron shield can be optimized together. This method can deal with discrete design variables which are defined to describe the cable arrangements of coil cross sections. A detailed algorithm of the present design is described and an example for designing a 1.5 T clinical iron shielded magnet for MRI is shown.