Modeling of non-ideal hard permanent magnets with an affine-linear model,illustrated for a bar and a horseshoe magnet

This study is dedicated to continuum-scale material modeling of isotropic permanent magnets. An affine-linear extension to the commonly used ideal hard model for permanent magnets is proposed, motivated, and detailed. In order to demonstrate the differences between these models, bar and horseshoe magnets are considered. The structure of the boundary value problem for the magnetic field and related solution techniques are discussed. For the ideal model, closed-form analytical solutions were obtained for both geometries. Magnetic fields of the boundary value problems for both models and differently shaped magnets were computed numerically by using the boundary element method. The results show that the character of the magnetic field is strongly influenced by the model that is used. Furthermore, it can be observed that the shape of an affine-linear magnet influences the near-field significantly. Qualitative comparisons with experiments suggest that both the ideal and the affine-linear models are relevant in practice, depending on the magnetic material employed. Mathematically speaking, the ideal magnetic model is a special case of the affine-linear one. Therefore, in applications where knowledge of the near-field is important, the affine-linear model can yield more accurate results—depending on the magnetic material.