MATELEC

Induction heating processes are being increasingly used in the manufacturing industry for various applications: mass heating, heat treatments processes ... They provide many advantages, and enable: - high temperature increase rates in the workpiece, - accurate control of the heating zone - a good reproducibility. Moreover, they are much more environment-friendly and enable energy savings. The complexity of the multiphysics couplings involved (electromagnetism, heat transfer, solid mechanics) is such that as an effective design of these processes has to go through a numerical approach. The MATELEC project aims at developing a design software tool coupling: - a numerical approach based on 3D modelling and optimization algorithms - design rules based on the know-how of the consortium partners. This new tool will have to make it possible to deal at the design stage with traditional problems such as: - lack of control over heating areas and heating times - poor distribution of residual stresses - insufficient mechanical behaviour of the inductors The design and control parameters will include physical parameters (frequency, current density, inductors velocity…) as well as geometrical ones (shape and localization of the inductors, adding or not of flux concentrators…) The project will be structured as follows: - selection of industrial cases - validation of the coupled numerical modelling - development of the optimization tool - validation on industrial processes of process parameters determined by the software tool