#52 🚀 Planar Magnetic Patent
SuperPowers for Electrical Engineers 🦸🏻♂️🦸🏼♀️
👋 Hello friends! Dr. Molina here 👨🔧
Welcome to Dr.Molina Newsletter, where I break down Magnetic designs for you every week, in 4 minutes. Join our community of more than 1044 curious engineers creating Super Powers!
If you want to unsubscribe, you will find a link at the bottom of this email.
New Life
I have become a dad. My little daughter is already here.
My wife and every mother in the world are heroes. The woman's power is incredible. I’m in love with both, my little baby and my wife 😍.
I’m in love with my New Life.
This week, we have:
Saturation Current- Excel or Frenetic Online?
Review Planar Magnetic patent
Ben Yaakov paper
Saturation Current- Excel or Frenetic Online?
I continue my fight against ONLY excel calculations. Most engineers don´t know how to calculate the saturation current of the inductor they have designed.
Therefore, they google it and create a function in excel, introduce some simplified values of the waveforms, and voilá! They feel Einstein!
Some of them, have created a discussion on Quora. If you are a senior manager at your company, this is what your engineers are doing.
This week, we have a new release of Frenetic, where you can calculate the saturation current, automatically at 25ºC and 100ºC.
For Ferrite materials
For Powder materials
For your own material.
My point here is. You could be using FO just to accelerate unique calculations.
Remember 160 times 1 hour is already a month of work.
HF Magnetics Community
This is the link to join us! Be one of the FOUNDERS of the community.
This community will focus on technical and business topics around Magnetics. Some channels will be:
Design magnetics
Manufacturing
Frenetic Online
This video (thanks Pablo!!) shows how to enter in the HF Magnetics community.
Review Planar Magnetic patent
The planar magnetics are a great solution to improve the power density. Companies like Payton or Himag are doing a lot of business with them.
They have created their own manufacturing technologies to get great final products, where the electrical design isn´t the key.
The fantastic heat dissipation capacity of the planar magnetics, due to the available dissipation area together with the allowed high current density of the windings, makes this technology very interesting.
The current density in concentric magnetics can reach 7-8 A/mm2, while I have seen 35 A/mm2 in planar magnetics.
I like to review patents and I have found a patent with a very interesting cooling technology to even increase the per se heat dissipation capacity of a planar magnetic. The patent protection expired and you can use it in your design if you wish. The patent owner was Hamilton Sundstrand Corporation, from IL (USA) with the number US6278353B1.
In the first picture below, you can see the final transformer.
In the following picture, you can see the proposed transformer construction, where the author includes two cooling sections, one by winding. I have detailed the corresponding with the primary. It’s based on 2 layers of copper or other conductive material with some extended areas, where you can find a hole for connecting them to an external dissipative element.
Ben Yaakov paper
But this is not new, the professor Ben Yaakov shared in 1986 a presentation about planar magnetics (Payton), showing some layers with a similar purpose.
Download the presentation here.
THE PROBLEM
One of the conclusions I find here is, we are not really innovating in magnetic design, because most engineers start from scratch with their understanding of magnetics.
SOLUTION
A world and huge database of designs, in a common platform, will solve this problem, allowing engineers to start their designs with tested technology for a similar application.
As Ben Yaakov said
Unless the copper and core losses are harnessed, the net size reduction, as the switching frequency is boosted, may be marginal.
Increasing the switching frequency helps, but understanding the magnetic design avoid stupid iterations using the knowledge created by other.
💥 TO AVOID FUTURE PROBLEMS, JOIN FRENETIC TODAY
And remember, if you are not satisfied, you can cancel anytime.
Frenetic Online is our platform for:
Design your Magnetics with maximum accuracy
Get reviews of your designs from industry experts
Build Samples
Connect with your suppliers and customers
This is what users said about Frenetic Online.
“Best magnetics design platform available today and constantly getting better” – Bob White - President And Chief Engineer -Embedded Power Labs.
“I value especially the freedom to model many different inductors before selecting a single one. The "Suggest Wire" feature - it truly is great!”-
Don Lucas – Senior Power Electronics Engineer at Lucas Consulting Services.
See you next week!