Magnetic Comparison Between Experimental Flake Powder and Spherical Powder for Inductor Cores at High Frequency

This article is the first work to carefully investigate the characteristics of iron loss per weight and relative permeability between the flake and spherical powders with a sinusoidal excitation up to a high frequency of 3.5 MHz in experiments using three separate measurement systems. The composition of the considered powder samples contains 0.001 wt% C, 0.012 wt% Si, 0.09 wt% Mn, 0.0004 wt% P, 0.008 wt% S, and 0.06 wt% O. The flake particle has the preferred orientation that the easy axes are normal to the platelet face, and the water atomized iron powder was processed with ball milling with the lubrication. Key objectives of the utilization of the three independent measurement systems with different specialized equipment and probes are to cross-check and overcome unexpected measurement errors of the related devices in use for validating measured results thoroughly. Experimental results demonstrate the much better performances on the iron loss per weight and relative permeability of the flake powder than that of the spherical powder at high frequencies. Physics-based explanations for the measured results are also presented. Furthermore, two estimation functions based on a six-parameter Steinmetz equation for the measured iron loss of the powders are developed by using MATLAB.