Journal of The Magnetics Society of Japan \Q1.22, Supplement, No.

S1 (1998)
© 1998 by The Magnetics Society of Japan

A Simple Approach for Determining Core-loss of

Magnetic Materials
C.F .FOO,D.M.ZHANG,X.LI
School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering,
Nanyang Technological University,
Nanyang Avenue, Singapore 639798

Abstract -In the design of high frequency high efficiency dc power supply, core losses in magnetic components
becomes an important design consideration. A simple in-house experimental setup consisting of a.n impedance
analyzer and a PC computer for determining core loss of Mn-Zn magnetic materials under sinusoidal excitation is
proposed here. The power requirement for this measurement is small. The method using compensating technique
provides reasonably accurate result as the determination of core loss is not significantly affected by the parasitic of
the measuring apparatus especially when measurement is done at high frequency.

l.INTRODUCTION measuring the voltage and current using an impedance

analyzer,and the core loss is constructed from these
In the design of high-frequency high-efficiency dc power measurements.
supplies, core loss in the magnetic components is im- 2.1 Inductor equivalent circuit
portant design consideration. Information of magnetic
core.provided by .manufacturers is limited and usually Consider an inductor with a magnetic core. The in-
given not in the frequency of flux density of your design ductor is modelled as a complex impedance either as
choice. an equiValent series circuit or as an equivalent parallel
In the measurement setup!l] [2] [3)to construct core losses, circuit shown in Fig.I.
it is necessary to amplify the AC signal to magnetize the
core under test by a wide bandwidth power amplifier.
The power required to magnetized the core increases
with the volume of the core. Measurement using larger
~
Fig l(a)
3J~
Fig 1(b)
magnetic cores would therefore need a larger driving
It is assumed that the flux in the magnetic core is
power to magnetize the core. On the other hand using
not in saturation. As an equivalent series circuit, the
smaller magnetic cores, the measurement of small sig-
impedance Z.. is expressed as
nal has to be done accurately. In this case the accuracy
of all equipment used becomes critical in the measuring Zs = Rs +jX.. (1)
process.
The purpose of this paper is to introduce simple mea- where Rs is the equivalent series resistance, and Xs the
surement technique for constructing core loss of mag- equivalent series reactance. The phase angle () is given
netic cores under sinusoidal high frequency excitation. as
The method is suitable for determining core-loss of low-
(2)
loss type m.agnetic components. The power require-
ment for this measurement is small. The method pro- where
vides reasonably accurate results as the determination
of the core loss is no significantly affected by the para- X .. =wL.. (3)
sitic of the simple measurement setup.
Lsis the equivalent inductance of the inductor winding.
For parallel circuit, the impedance Z .. is expressed as
2.MEASUREMENT OF THE MAGNETIC CORE (4)
LOSS
Rp is the equivalent parallel resistance,Xpthe equiva-
The core loss in a magnetic material under AC mag-
lent reactance.
netization consists of three components: the hysteresis
loss, the eddy current loss, and the residue loss. The 2.2 Core Loss Measurement of Low-wss Magnetic Ma-
hysteresis loss and current loss contribute a significant terials
portion of the core-loss. The method proposed deter- For magnetic materials of low-loss and high permeabil-
mines the core loss by direct method. This is done by ityI1}, the phase angle () is near 90° .Since the loss power

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of the device under test is constructed from the mea- (R.+ RcGI')2+(wL.-..la )2 E
E'= (10)
sured amplitudes of voltage, current, and the phase an- R~+(wL.)2

gle 0, the accuracy of the constructed power is largely At given operating frequency 1 , parameters Ra and
dependent on the accuracy of the phase angle 0[1][4\. La are measured by impedance analyzer. The required
Various direct methods reported in [41 indicated the C for resonance or near resonance is then determined.
significant errors in power loss measurement from ex- The driving voltage E' for the maintaining of certain
tra phase shift associated with the parasitic in the mea- flux density in the core is determined using Eq.10.
surement errors or delays in the measuring equipment. When resonance occurs,
2.3 Determination 01 core-loss by resonant technique wLs - -de = 0 (11)
The problem mentioned in section 2.2 can be overcome The capacitance C required is
if 0 is effectively near or equal to zero. In this case
the constructed power loss is not sensitive to measure- C=frL
w • (12)
ment parasitic. At 0 = 0° the circuit is in the reso-
nant state. This state is implemented by connecting a Eq.lD becomes
suitable value capacitor C in series with the induct or
winding. At the resonance or near resonance, the con-
E' =
v R·+Ro.. r E
R h(wL.)2
(13)

structed power is no relation or least sensitive to phase It can be deduced that Ef is much smaller than E for
errors. During resonance, the power from the source is the same flux density since at high frequency IwLsl »
effectively converted into core loss.
IRs+Reapl. Then E ~ R.~~l' Ef (13a)
In order to maintain constant flux density, the induced
In this paper, the determination of core-loss measure-
voltage across the inductor winding should be main-
ment is obtained from an experimental setup using the
tained constant using the followiIig relationship
HP 4194A impedance analyzer(IA) and a PC for data
Bm -- E
4.44/NA", (5) processing. The setup is shown in Fig.2.

where Bm =maximum flux density( T) HP4194A

IMPEDANCE ANALY
~
N =number of turns of the inductor winding
Am=cross sectional area of the magnetic core(m2 ) Lcur Lpot Hpot H cur
E =rms value of the induced voltage of the inductor
TEST FIXTURE TEST
winding( V)
1 =frequency( Hz ) Fig 2 Experiment setup
At certain frequency 1 ,Bm ex: E and
From equivalent circuit of Fig.la and Fig.1b,
e(t) = i(t)(Ra + jwLa) (6)
(14)
where
e{t} =instantaneous voltage across the inductor wind- At resonance,
ing( V)
i{t} =instantaneous current (A ) (15)
The rms value of current I is given by
The power loss per volume is calculated using the fol-
I E (7) lowing formula:
..; R:+(wL.)2

With series capacitance C , the voltage required be- (16)

comes E' where Ve is the volume of the magnetic core. Ram =
e' (t) = i(t)(Rs + Reap + jwLa + j2c) (8) Ra + Reap
where Rcap=equivalent resistance value of the capaci- 2.4 Measurement procedure
tor,e ' et) is the instantaneous voltage with C in series. The experiment procedure for constructing the core loss
Now the circuit current should be kept constant to using the impedance analyzer is summarized as follow-
maintain the same flux density, where ing.
(a) Set up lA functions such as OPEN and SHORT
(9) compensation and input flux density,frequency range,
inductance factor, core type and size parameters by
Combining Eq.7 and Eq.9 gives reading the data to the computer.
(b) Measure the inductance values at each frequency

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point and calculate the corresponding resonant capaci- equipment,namely the impedance analyzer. The second
tor values. reason is to reduce the driving power required for mag-
(c) Perform frequency sweep at the frequency range,ie netizing the core.
adjust f to get the resonant frequency fo . To stabi-
lize the flux in the magnetic core, the analyzer sweeps
through the range of the frequency several times. The REFERENCES
oscillation voltage level of the first frequency will be [l)V.Joseph Thottuveli, Thomas G. Wilson,and Harry A.Owen,
set based on the impedance value Xs obtained when "High frequency measurement techniques for magnetic core" ,
measuring the inductance before compensation at this IEEE Trans on Power Electronics,Vo1.5, no.1,January 1990.
frequency. (2)David K.Conry,George F.Pierce,"Measurement techniques
(d) Measure E' ,Rsm, fo at the resonant frequency. for the design of high-frequency SMPS transformers" ,Proceed-
(e) Compute the flux density Bm automatically using ings of Virginia Power Electronics Center Seminar,1988.
Eqn.(5) and (13a). The flux density will hence be (3)P.M.Gradzki and F.C.Lee,"High-Frequency core loss char-
B - E _ KL,E' acterization technique based on impedance measurement" ,High
m - 4.44NA",/ - NA",R,,,, Frequency Power Conference,1991,Toronto,Canada.
where K = 27r/4.44, Ram = Rs + Reap (4)F.Dong Tan, Jeff L. Vollin and Slobodan M.Cuk, " A
practical Approach for magnetic Core-loss Characterization" ,
(f) Compare Bm with the required flux density B. IEEE APEC,1993.
(g) Auto tune the Vs to the required value.
(h) Record E', Rsm,! as Bm approaches or equal to B
(i) Increase the frequency to next step.
(j)Change the capacitor with the correct value.
(k)Repeat steps (c) to (j) for the rest of frequencies.
(I) Compute the loss Pe at each point. 15 rn3 '
Pe (mWlc )1 /
2.5 Experiment Results : /
30mI/
The core sample under test is a toroid core, Tomita l /~
TRB632/2Fl with dimension of 6x3x2mm3 • The mea- 10 ······. . ·····. . ··f. . ·(:. ··. . . . ·. . . ··i. . . ·. . ·····. ··. ·. . .~ .......................
I •

surement was conducted at lOmT and 30mT. Frequency ;! ' ;

"
range tested is 50kHz to 500kHz. The result of core loss ~
I:
is shown in Fig 3. Table 1 shows the measured data for /:•
,.,1,
B=lOmT only. From the results, it is observed that E' !" : I I

are much smaller than E in accordance with Eq.13.

5 ······.~~/~····-!--················1················7·rmT-
........
I ,
(~:
,,
:,
•

,
.,,
•

3.CONCLUSION

A simple experimental method for constructing core

loss of high frequency low-loss and high permeability ~OO 200 300 400 500
ferrite magnetic component is described. The equip- t(J<Hz)
ment required only an impedance analyzer in the mea-
Fig 3 Core loss vs frequency
surement setup. The resonant technique is introduced
in the measurement process for two purposes. One is
to reduce the errors of power measurement associated
with directed-method measurement setup as mentioned
in[1][2][3]. This is possible when the inductor test cir-
cuit is set at resonance to give a zero phase angle. The
accuracy of this measurement depends only on a single
Table 1
f E Ls cap Reap Rsm Rs E P Pe
(kHz) (V) (JlH) (nf) (ohm) (ohm) (ohm) (V) (mW) (mW/cm"")
136 0.097 48.58 28.17 1.14 2.19 1.05 0.0056 0.0066 0.1833
194 0.141 47.00 14.32 1.45 3.50 2.05 0.0088 0.0128 0.3556
245 0.182 50.17 8.41 3.52 5.78 2.56 0.0145 0.0160 0.4444
301 0.228 50.01 5.59 2.00 9.30 7.30 0.0232 0.0456 1.2667
368 0.288 50.01 3.74 3.58 14.84 11.26 0.037 0.0704 1.9556
443 0.356 51.01 2.53 4.73 27.53 23.80 0.068 0.1488 4.1333
490 0.396 50.72 2.08 4.18 36.84 32.66 0.091 0.2041 5.6694

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