Recent Trends in Development of Soft Magnetic Material for Power Electronics Applications: A Review

The development of soft magnetic material has resulted in reduced size and improved efficiencies of power-handling electrical devices, such as motors, generators, inductors, transformers and other transducers. Various soft magnetic materials (SMM) are available which assures for high frequency operation. When developed as oxides, SMM perform well as compared to other magnetic materials. The soft magnetic materials are insulating in nature and perform excellent in reducing eddy current losses. However, they experience saturation magnetization which is almost four times less than steel. Further, this significantly reduces the power density in power electronics devices developed using soft magnetic materials. The present day soft magnetic materials have unique nanostructure to keep eddy current losses minimum even at higher frequencies. Polymer nanocomposites are the modern class of SMM, and are comprised of nano-meter sized particles with polymer binder and developed at high temperature. The soft magnetic materials with nanoparticles perform well due to isotropic nature and well suited for use electrical and electronics devices.