Anisotropic and strain-dependent model of magnetostriction in electrical steel sheets

This paper presents an anisotropic and mechanical strain-dependent model of magnetostriction in electrical steel sheets and its application in finite-element computations. The presented model is bidirectional and the data needed for its derivation is extracted solely from unidirectional measurements under mechanical loading. The model has six parameters that describe the magnetic and strain behavior and two parameters that describe the anisotropy. The validation of the model is carried out through measurements and computations on a single-phase transformer-like device. The comparison between computation and measurement results seems to be reasonable regardless of the fact that the magnetic behavior is modeled as single valued, isotropic, and anhysteretic. Original magnetostriction measurements are also presented and the importance of magnetostriction anisotropy in a priori isotropic electrical steel sheets is demonstrated. The model is easy to implement in existing codes and the anisotropic behavior is straightforward to modify according to a specific material.