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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON MAGNETICS, VOL. 36, NO. 4, JULY 2000

Electromagnetic Forming of Thin Metal Sheets

Ali Meriched, Mouloud Fliachi, and Hassane Mohellebi

AbstractThe present paper describes a numerical method to

solve the problem of the electromagnetic forming of clamped thin
circular metal sheets by using a flat spiral coil. The method involves
circuit analysis, electromagnetic field calculation and the dynamic
plastic deformation of the workpiece. A two-dimensional axisymmetric model based on the integral representation of the electromagnetic vector potential is proposed for the calculation of the
magnetic field, eddy currents and the electromagnetic force density
in the metal sheet. Equations for the motion of the loaded workpiece are used assuming plane stress condition.
Index TermsAxisymmetric model, current density, electromagnetic forming, magnetic vector potential, plastic deformation.

I. INTRODUCTION

S THE MAGNETIC forming of tubular workpieces requires a very high transient magnetic field, a sudden discharge of a bank of capacitors through a coil has to be realized
[1][5]. If this field is coupled with a metal workpiece, intense
impulsive forces will act on the material and will accelerate it
to a very high velocity in a very short time. In this way metallic
components may be formed or assembled in the same way as in
other high rate processes [1], [2]. While the magnetic forming of
tubular conductors by solenoidal coils is relatively well investigated [1]-[4], the problem of the forming of metal sheets by
flat spiral coils is less analyzed. In reference [5] this problem
is solved as three separate coupled problems where the electromagnetic problem is formulated in terms of the magnetic field
as a boundary value problem and the electrical problem as a
circuit with mutual inductance. In this article we investigate a
numerical method to simulate the forming of a clamped circular thin disk by a flat spiral coil which is approximated by
coaxial circular loops. The method used [3], [4], [6] relies on
the space discretization of the source coil and the workpiece in
circular elementary wire loops for which the produced magnetic
vector potential can be computed by applying the BiotSavart
law [8]. The problem being transient a time discretization is also
required to evaluate the magnetic field, the current densities in
the source coil and in the workpiece and the electromagnetic
forces acting on the workpiece at each time step. The latter ones
are used in the mechanical equations governing the motion of
the workpiece to compute its displacement, velocity and acceleration at each time interval. Finally a circuit equation is solved
to find the new current in the source and the voltage across it.

Manuscript received October 25, 1999.

A. Meriched was with the University of Bejaia, Institute of Electrotechnics,
06000 Bejaia Algeria.
M. Fliachi is with the University of Nantes, L.R.T.I/C.R.T.T B.P. 406 SaintNazaire Cedex France.
Publisher Item Identifier S 0018-9464(00)06736-4.

Fig. 1.

Schematic of the electromagnetic forming system.

II. THE ELECTROMAGNETIC PROBLEM

A model of the system to be analyzed is shown schematically
in Fig. 1 which shows a circular clamped metal sheet placed
above a flat spiral coil connected to a charged capacitor. To compute the electromagnetic part of the problem, we use a method
based on the discretization of the source and the workpiece assuming an axisymmetric configuration. For an elementary circular loop we can obtain from Maxwells equations and Ohms
law the following:
in the inductor,
(1)
in the workpiece,

(2)

where
and

are the azimuthal components of the current densities,

the scalar electric potential due to the voltage,
applied to each elementary loop, and
the azimuthal component of the magnetic vector
potential created by all the elementary loops in a
given point.
and
are the electric conductivities of the workpiece
and the source inductor respectively.
to indicate a material derivative
Note that we have used
which avoids the evaluation of the motional induced electromotive force by choosing an appropriate coordinate system for our
problem [3], [7].
As our variables are not varying sinusoidally, a time discretization is also necessary. The following simple finite
difference formula is used to approximate the derivative of the
vector potential:

00189464/00$10.00 2000 IEEE

(3)

MERICHED et al.: ELECTROMAGNETIC FORMING OF THIN METAL SHEETS

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The magnetic vector potential created by a thin circular loop

can be obtained by using the BiotSavart law. By using cylindrical coordinates, it can be expressed in terms of the current
densities and the complete elliptic integrals [5], [8] as follows:

where
is the number of elementary loops in which each turn
of the inductor has been subdivided. The current in the workpiece is calculated similarly by summing over the number of
elementary loops in which the workpiece has been subdivided.
The current in the source, produced by the charged bank of
capacitors feeding the source coil, can be expressed as:

(4)

(10)

and
are the elliptic integrals of the first and second
kind, respectively, is a geometrical factor depending on the coand the target point
ordinates of the source point
where we wish to calculate the magnetic vector potential. The
current density in the source loop of section is designated by
and
is the permeability of free space and also of
conductors. The total magnetic vector potential in a given point
in the workpiece or in the source is obtained by summing all
the contributions of the elementary loops present. By replacing
the formulas obtained for the magnetic vector potential and its
derivative in equations (1) and (2) and after elimination of the
elementary electric potentials, we can arrive after a lengthy calculation at a system of linear equations where the unknowns are
the current densities in the elementary loops of the source coil
and of the workpiece. The system obtained can be written as:

from which we can obtain:

(11)
is the current flowing in the inductor at time ,
are the voltages across the bank of capacitors at
respectively, and is the capacitance of the bank.
III. EQUATIONS OF MOTION
The equations of motion of the disk in the radial and axial
directions are given by the following [5]:

(12)
(13)

(5)
depends only on geometrical factors
The square matrix
and the conductivities of the system. Its dimension is the total
number of the elementary loops in the source and the workpiece
and it represents physically the impedance matrix of the system.
The vector is the unknown vector of current densities in the
is a vector depending
system and the right hand side
and the
on the current densities evaluated at the instant
instantaneous total applied voltage.
The solution of this system at each time increment will then
allow us to compute the current densities in all the elementary
loops. The flux densities in the workpiece could then be evaluated analytically allowing us to find the elementary electromagnetic force by using the following well known equation:
(6)
The radial and axial force densities are given by the following
expressions respectively:
(7)

and
and ,

where
is the meridian distance measured
from the center of the disk,
and
are the displacements in the and
directions,
the thickness,
is true stress, and
the density.
, and
denote the meridian, circumferenSubscripts
tial, and thickness directions, respectively, and 0 denotes the initial
values.
and
are magnetic pressures evaluated
from the components of the electromagnetic force.
The strain-rate effect on the properties of the material can
be taken into account by adding the work-hardening law for
a material under plastic deformation. There are many models
proposed in the literature and in this work we have used the
following law given by [5]:

(8)
, and
are the current density, the radial and axial
where
components of the magnetic flux density, respectively, in a given
elementary loop of the workpiece. The corresponding magnetic
pressures are then evaluated easily by integration.
The current in the source coil at any instant is given by the
following relation:
(9)

(14)
where

, and

is the effective stress,

is the effective plastic strain rate.
are material constants to be determined by field tests.

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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON MAGNETICS, VOL. 36, NO. 4, JULY 2000

TABLE I
PARAMETERS OF THE SYSTEM

Fig. 2. Geometry of the system.

A finite difference method similar to the one used in [3] has

been implemented to solve the mechanical problem at each time
step to obtain the new position of the deformed metal sheet.
IV. NUMERICAL SIMULATION AND RESULTS
The linear system of equations where the unknowns are the
current densities in the elementary loops of the source and the
workpiece is solved at each time step using the LU decomposition method with partial pivoting. The components of the flux
densities are then evaluated analytically from the expression of
the magnetic vector potential allowing us to compute the components of the electromagnetic force and pressure. The latter
ones are used in the equations of motion to obtain the new position of each elementary loop of the disk. Finally the new current
flowing in the inductor is calculated and the voltage across the
bank of capacitors is computed. The whole process is then repeated for the next time increment and we stop the computations
when the velocity of the workpiece drops to zero or a maximum
specified time is reached. The overall algorithm used is summarized in the flowchart represented in Fig. 3.
The electromagnetic system shown schematically in Fig. 2
with its parameters given in Table I, has been simulated and

Fig. 3.

Flowchart of the implemented algorithm.

some of the results obtained are shown in the following figures.

In Fig. 4 we show the current in the inductor and the induced
current in the disk. The system behaves as a step up transformer
and we can see that the current in the workpiece is lagging the
current in the source coil by an angle of 180 degrees. These currents have a frequency which is equal to around 32 kHz. The
first peak of the induced current is around 150 kA. The coms are shown in
ponents of the magnetic flux density at
Fig. 5 where we note that the axial component is very small compared to the radial one which has a magnitude around 4 Tesla.
In Fig. 6 we show the total axial magnetic pressure at the same
s where we can see that considerable pressures are
time
developed in this process. In Fig. 7 we show the deformed plate
s,
s and the plate will have
at the time instants
this bowl shaped form at the end of the process.

MERICHED et al.: ELECTROMAGNETIC FORMING OF THIN METAL SHEETS

Fig. 4.

Currents in the source and in the plate t(s).

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Fig. 7. Shape of the plate r (mm).

direction and 4 in the direction) and 180 elementary loops

in the source coil (6 by 6 in each turn). We can note that only
two elementary loops in direction are sufficient for the discretization of the workpiece as its thickness is not very different
from the skin depth. In the source coil the number of the finite
volumes is very important because the effect of the corners, the
effect of proximity and the skin effect are all observed while
varying this number.
V. CONCLUSION

Fig. 5.

Axial and radial flux densities r (mm).

In this work we have developed a numerical method which

can simulate the electromagnetic forming of clamped thin metal
sheets by solving a sequence of three coupled problems. The results obtained are satisfactory and can be used for design purposes.
REFERENCES

Fig. 6. Axial magnetic pressure r (mm).

The final results presented are obtained when we have considered 260 elementary loops in the workpiece (65 along the

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