News

Powerful Ferrite Magnetic Design Tool

January 16, 2020 by Paul Shepard

TDK Corporation has introduced its completely revised Magnetic Design Tool with enhanced functionality. The updated tool now enables the fast and easy calculation and graphical representation of application-related parameters for all EPCOS ferrite materials, including new materials for high-frequency switch-mode power supplies, and core shapes.

The powerful Magnetic Design Tool is available as a browser-based application and has been tested in commonly used browsers such as Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer and Opera. Alternatively, it can be downloaded and used with Windows 10. In the current version, the Magnetic Design Tool allows users to define the parameters for their own cores and then use them in their calculations.

The versatile tool can be used to calculate and display the most important material properties, such as power loss versus frequency, flux density, temperature and the performance factor.

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In addition, it can also perform a comprehensive range of core calculations, including the AL-value in dependence to the air gap, the determination of transferable power, or the calculation of impedance versus frequency.

The Magnetic Design Tool provides access to the digitized material data for all current TDK Electronics ferrite materials and allows application-related parameters to be calculated and represented on graphs, hysteresis loop, power loss, initial permeability, amplitude permeability and complex permeability.

Material properties

Depending on the selected material, the software can display the following graphs:

  • hysteresis loop
  • power loss vs. frequency, flux density, temperature and the performance factor
  • initial permeability vs. temperature
  • amplitude permeability vs. flux density or field strength
  • complex permeability vs. frequency in serial and parallel representation

Core calculations

Depending on the selected material and core form, the software offers the following functions:

  • overview of data,
  • calculation of AL-value in dependence of the air gap (or vice versa)
  • representation of effective permeability over temperature,
  • determination of transferable power Ptrans
  • calculation of third harmonic distortion under circuit conditions
  • calculation of appropriate air gap, Al value and the number of turns for a given permeability drop p [%], representing the curve of inductance or permeability vs. DCbias
  • display of ratio of the ac- to dc-resistance vs. frequency