Finite Element Method based Thermal Magnetic Core Characteristics Modeling and Thermal Simulation

Electric vehicles and electric aircraft are being developed for decarbonization, and their power converters need to be miniaturized. High-frequency switching of semiconductors using GaN or SiC materials is an attracting attention as one of the options to reduce the size of the inductor core. On the other hand, reducing the core size leads to an increase in core temperature. Therefore, Design methods that take heat into consideration are desired, and the use of simulation is expected. Although FEM is an accurate simulation method, it takes a lot of calculation time when used as a thermal simulation during the circuit operation for several hours. Thus, accurate core loss modeling is necessary. In this study, we used accurate FEM-based modeling to perform thermal simulation of inductors in high-frequency switching.