Spectral Element Method Modeling of eddy current losses in conductive materials

This paper concerns the modeling of eddy current losses in conductive materials in the vicinity of a high-frequency transformer; more specifically in problems where a high ratio between the object dimensions and the skin depth exists. The analysis is performed using the Spectral Element Method (SEM), where high order Legendre-Gauss-Lobatto polynomials are applied to increase the accuracy of the results with respect to the Finite Element Method (FEM). A convergence analysis is performed for both the SEM and FEM. Two different objectives are investigated. First, the discretizations at which the discrepancy is minimized, are compared. Second, the discretizations at which the trade-off between computational effort and accuracy is optimized, are compared. The results have indicated that by applying the SEM, a higher accuracy per degree of freedom and significantly lower computation time are obtained with respect to the FEM. Therefore, the SEM has proven to be particularly useful for this type of problem.