THE USE OF MULTIFREQUENCY INDUCTION HEATING FOR TEMPERATURE DISTRIBUTION CONTROL

The paper presents possibilities of controlling temperature field distribution in inductively heated charge. The change of its distribution was obtained using the sequential one-, two-, and three-frequency heating. The study was conducted as a multi-variant computer simulation of hard coupled electromagnetic and temperature fields. For the analysis, a professional calculation software package utilizing the finite element method, Flux 3D, was used. The problem of obtaining an appropriate temperature distribution in the heated charge of a complex shape is very important in many practical applications. A typical example is hardening of gear wheels. For such an application, it is necessary to obtain (on the surface and at a desired depth) an uniform temperature distribution on the tooth face, top land and bottom land of the gear. The obtained temperature should have proper distribution and value. Such a distribution is very difficult to achieve.