Efficient frequency-transient co-simulation of coupled heat-electromagnetic problems

Background With the recent advent of inductive charging systems all major automotive manufacturers develop concepts to wirelessly charge electric vehicles. Efficient designs require virtual prototyping that accounts for electromagnetic and thermal fields. The coupled simulations can be computationally very costly. This is because of the high frequencies in the electromagnetic part. This paper derives a mixed frequency-transient model as approximation to the original problem. We propose a co-simulation such that the electromagnetic part is simulated in the frequency domain while the thermal part remains in time domain. Results The iteration scheme for the frequency-transient model is convergent for high frequency excitation. The error bound improves quadratically with increasing frequency. Conclusions The frequency-transient model is very efficient for coupled heat-electromagnetic simulations since the time scales typically differ by several orders of magnitude. The time steps of the full system can be chosen according to the heat subsystem only.