Selection of Measurement Modality for Magnetic Material Characterization of an Electromagnetic Device Using Stochastic Uncertainty Analysis

Magnetic material properties of an electromagnetic device (EMD) can be estimated by solving an inverse problem where electromagnetic or mechanical measurements are adequately interpreted by a numerical forward model. Due to measurement noise and uncertainties in the forward model, errors are made in the reconstruction of the material properties. This paper describes the formulation and implementation of a time-efficient numerical error estimation procedure for predicting the optimal measurement modality that leads to minimal error resolution in magnetic material characterization. We extended the traditional Cramér-Rao bound technique for error estimation due to measurement noise only, with stochastic uncertain geometrical model parameters. Moreover, we applied the method onto the magnetic material characterization of a Switched Reluctance Motor starting from different measurement modalities: mechanical; local and global magnetic measurements. The numerical results show that the local magnetic measurement modality needs to be selected for this test case. Moreover, the proposed methodology is validated numerically by Monte Carlo simulations, and experimentally by solving multiple inverse problems starting from real measurements. The presented numerical procedure is able to determine a priori error estimation, without performing the very time consuming Monte Carlo simulations.