Improvement of saturation property of iron powder core by flux homogenizing structure

A new core structure is proposed to improve the saturation property of an inductor made of iron powder core. In the conventional structure made of a single core material, converging flux lines cause local magnetic saturation at the inner side of the corners of the magnetic path. Therefore, the conventional inductor shows worse saturation property than expected from its core material. This degradation mechanism is solved in the proposed core structure through homogenization of the flux distribution at the corners. Experiments are performed to evaluate the flux homogenization and improvement of the saturation property. Results show a homogenized flux distribution in the proposed core structure. Furthermore, the flux level improved by 28% while the inductance decreased by 40% of its initial value. Both these results are consistent with theoretical expectations, except that a larger improvement is found in the experiment compared to the 16% improvement predicted by numerical calculation.