Numeric design engineering of a magneto-inductive foil sensor

In this paper the numeric design engineering of a magneto inductive foil sensor will be discussed. This sensor system is a position sensor which enables to measure distances with high resolution. First the approach of this project is explained and the objectives are presented. Then the build-up sequence and functional active principle of the sensor is described. Therefore appropriate models shall be used to reflect the physical effects of the device accordingly. After that we perform the numerical design engineering of the device using Finite Element Analysis (FEA). For this purpose the geometry and the complexity of the mesh will be presented. Due to the different geometric dimensions of the sensor element and the sender, represented as a permanent magnet, meshing of the whole system is very challenging. After that the comparison between simulation results and measurements are shown. We achieve quite good compliance, only about 3–5% of deviation. The conclusion and outlook, which reviews and discusses further steps, complete the paper.