Design and Analysis of a Novel Traveling Wave Induction Heating System With Magnetic Slot Wedges for Heating Moving Thin Strips

A novel traveling wave induction heating system with distributed windings and magnetic slot wedges (SW-TWIH) is proposed to address the inhomogeneous eddy-current density problem which dominates the thermal distribution on the surface of work strips. Typical traveling wave induction heating (TWIH) system is replaced by the proposed one enabling the magnetic fluxes generated by each phase to interact and complement with each other and compensate for the weak magnetic areas so as to generate more uniform and concentrated eddy-current density to lead to more homogeneous temperature distribution. In order to realize the performance of the proposed SW-TWIH system and its improved design, finite-element method (FEM) simulations are carried out and reported in this paper. Simulation results of the proposed system are compared with those of a traditional TWIH device and another design, which has distributed windings but without magnetic slot wedges.