Computer-aided design of toroidal air-core inductors for high energy levels

A method is presented for the design of inductors that recurrently store a substantial amount of electric energy; joules with frequencies in the order of tens of kHz. The objective of this method arose from the necessity of designing air-core inductors as part of an electronic conversion circuit for the control and transfer of electric energy in the submegawatt range. For specific geometrical configurations, design criteria such as weight and electrical losses (or a compromise between them) in combination with the thermal behavior are calculated. An analysis of the design criteria for a normalized inductive storage element is introduced and applied to a computer-aided design method. The computer program provides either the design of a new core or the design of an inductor on an available air-core arrangement, reducing the time for calculation