Additive manufacturing for soft magnetic materials

Additive manufacturing technologies are known for fast prototyping and enabling a wide variety of shapes beneficial to the design of components. If materials used for 3D printers were first mainly polymers, nowadays they are beginning to become more complex in order to allow metal and ceramic 3D printing using composite feedstock. In this work, we aim at additively manufacturing magnetic component. The building process is presented by using filament feedstock for Fused Deposition Modeling process and part of the produced cores have been magnetically characterized. A second innovative printing process using a pellet-based material is investigated for the printing part. In order to consider soft magnetic ferrite, the modeling of the printed object has been carried out. First to calculate the losses in a toroidal inductor and take into account the strong impact of the temperature on the magnetic permeability. Second, to investigate the evolution of magnetic permeability in link with the material density. Thereafter an undulated geometry of a toroidal inductor that is enabled by 3d printing is presented as an illustration. Experimental characterization of the magnetic properties has been carried out to verify the modeling results concerning the impact of the density over permeability.