Computation of Core Losses in Electrical Steel Laminations With Impacts of Normal Flux and PWM Switching Considered

Normal flux (perpendicular to the lamination plane) and pulsewidth modulation (PWM) can have significant impacts on the losses of steel laminations, e.g., in converter-fed synchronous machines or transformers. This article proposes a model for computing the losses of steel laminations with the impacts of normal flux and PWM switching considered. The total core losses are computed by modifying the core losses of a reference sinusoidal case with the global statistics about supply voltage. A dedicated test setup was developed to validate the loss model. The measurement shows that the proposed model can compute core losses with acceptable accuracy, reasonable computing time, and moderate demand for computing resources.