Analytical Modeling of a Three-phase Magnetic Amplifier-based Continuously Variable Reactor

There has been a renewed interest in the magnetic amplifier (magamp) based technology, especially in power system applications. With an increased number of legs and windings (both AC and DC) in three-phase devices compared to single-phase devices, it is very important to understand their magnetic behavior with multiple excitations. Having an insight into the magnetic characteristics of these devices opens up the door for possible integration with other systems in order to realize a wide variety of applications. This paper presents an analytical model based on the magnetic equivalent circuit (MEC) for a configuration of the three-phase magnetic amplifier based continuously variable reactor. A three-dimensional finite element analysis (3-D FEA) model of the reactor has been developed using a commercially available software package. The accuracy of the proposed MEC model is checked by comparing the reactor inductance calculated with both MEC and FEA models. The small error between the inductance values verifies the accuracy of the proposed model.