Multiple traveling wave electromagnetic rotating power supplies: FEM field modeling

Heteropolar electromechanical structures show strong promise as rotating power supplies for electromagnetic launchers with kinetic energy storage and transient magnetic energy storage that can achieve high power densities and small volumes. Both synchronous and asynchronous variants are based on multiple traveling waves of high-amplitude magnetic fields that have multiple velocities. The authors present a finite element formulation of the diffusion problem for time-harmonic excitation with several different frequencies. In this formulation, phasorial quantities are used and a complex-variable functional treatment is set down to correspond to the electromagnetic partial differential equations. The treatment is applicable to the self-excitation process in fast transient regimes of pulsed discharge of an asynchronous generator in which the nonuniformity (spatial and temporal) of the traveling waves plays an important role. Results are presented for a sample problem