Coupled electro-magneto-thermal model for induction heating process of a moving billet

The purpose of this study is to present a coupled electro-magnetic and thermal model for numerical analysis of an induction heating system including the workpieces moving relative to the inductors. In this paper, a finite element method-based numerical analysis of a low-frequency (60 Hz) induction heating system for the one-dimensional solution of a stationary circular billet and the two-dimensional solution considering the dynamic effect of circular billets moving along the skid rails with constant speed are presented and compared against each other. The non-linearities of both the electro-magnetic and thermal material properties are also taken into account in the model. The computational results have been compared with experimental data. As a result, it is suggested that the presented numerical model may be a very cost-effective tool in predicting the temperature of a workpiece in a variable flux field where the interested workpieces undergo an arbitrary change in the electro-magnetic fields. It is possible to obtain some preliminary results more accurate than those calculated from previous works using a stationary model on electro-magnetic field and temperature distribution of workpieces by applying the presented numerical model. (C) 2012 Elsevier Masson SAS. All rights reserved.