An improved computational technique for calculating electromagnetic forces and power absorptions generated in spherical and deformed body in levitation melting devices

An improved computational technique for calculating the electromagnetic force field, the power absorption, and the deformation of an electromagnetically levitated metal sample is described. The technique is based on the volume integral method but represents a substantial refinement: the coordinate transformation employed allows the efficient treatment of a broad class of rotationally symmetrical bodies. Compound results are presented to represent the behavior of levitation melted metal samples in a multicoil, multifrequency levitation unit to be used in microgravity experiments. The theoretical predictions are compared with both analytical solutions and the results of previous computational efforts for the spherical samples, and the agreement has been very good. The treatment of problems involving deformed surfaces and actually predicting the deformed shape of the specimens should be the major contribution of the proposed method.>