Magnetizable concrete tech promises to challenge current power inductors
The increasing demand for more and clean energy has led to a rising need for large inductive components. This poses a challenge to providing magnetics optimized for cost, size and performance. The high demand has sparked the development of both improved magnetic materials (e.g., powder cores, amorphous), winding technologies (e.g., copper foil, flat wire) and optimized core geometries.
This has yield a high refinement, pushing the limits of an otherwise conventional way of making inductive components. However, advancement in small steps maybe not enough to cope with the market expectations driven by the renewables revolution.
MAGMENT power inductors and transformers are based on a disruptive technology for both a novel material and an innovative magnetic design. The material is a patented concrete with magnetisable particles embedded in a cement matrix manufactured in a pressureless process.
Its features are:
• Permeability in the same range as powder core materials
• High DC-bias capability
• Saturation reached only at very high fields
• Very low core losses
• Very high thermal conductivity to efficiently dissipate heat
• Concrete-like mechanical robustness in a very broad temperature range
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These unique and outstanding properties allow the design of rugged inductive components with a distributed air gap for minimized winding losses by completely surrounding the coil by the MAGMENT material. This ensures a complete magnetic filling of the available volume within the housing yielding maximum performance and cooling.
As compared to the conventional manufacturing of winding cores and sealing with a potting material, the flowability of our concrete materials allow a “wind and magnetic pour” process, which goes along with absolute shape and size flexibility. This allows to both tailor components to minimize material utilization and to any given space constraints by a special magnetic design algorithm yielding lowest cost as compared to any other inductive technology.
