Design and FEM Analysis of a New Distributed Vernier Traveling Wave Induction Heater for Heating Moving Thin Strips

A new traveling wave induction heating system with distributed windings and vernier structure (DV-TWIH) is proposed. That system is specially designed to address the inhomogeneous eddy current density problem that dominates the pattern of thermal distribution on the surface of work. The typical traveling wave induction heating (TWIH) system is replaced by double-layer vernier combined ones, which enables the magnetic fluxes generated by each phase to interact and complement each other to compensate for local weak magnetic fluxes in order to generate more uniform and concentrated eddy current density and temperature distribution in the work piece. In order to study the performance of the proposed DV-TWIH system, an interpolative FEA modeling method is introduced in this paper. Calculation results of the proposed systems are compared to those of typical TWIH and the traveling wave induction heating system with distributed windings but without vernier structure (D-TWIH) devices. Analytical analysis shows the attractive performance of the proposed system.