A SIMPLIFIED NEUMANNS
FORMULA FOR CALCULATION OF INDUCTANCE OF SPIRAL COIL
H.L. Chan, K.W.E. Cheng and D. Sutanto
The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong
ABSTRACT
The state of the art design of switching mode power
supply relies heavily on soft switching technique, which
makes use of stray capacitance of active switch and
leakage inductance of transformer to form a resonant
tank, therefore the calculation of inductance of magnetic
component is important. In this paper, a simplified
Neumanns Formula is proposed to calculate the
inductance of spiral coil, which requires cumbersome
and tedious calculation in usual manner.
1. INTRODUCTION
High frequency DC/DC converter such as phase-shifted
converters requires a transformer for DC isolation. The
leakage inductance of the transformer can also be used
as part of the resonant inductance so that zero-voltage-
switching (ZVS) can be achieved in the switching
devices.
The operation of the square-wave phase-shifted
converter [ 1-21 depends on the leakage inductance of the
transformer. It affects the resonant frequency of the
converter and also the ZVS of the converter. Therefore,
the transformer must be designed with care, so that the
leakage inductance must be calculated exactly.
However, the most commonly-used method [3] to
calculate inductance or magnetic flux of conductors or
transformers is the use of line integral of magnetic
vector potential due to current around the perimeter of
area through which the flux is to be evaluated, this
method gives high accurate result but only a less detail
about the transformer is given. Therefore, some other
research works were done to work out some more
characteristics of transformers, for example: Hurley et
al. [4] used Maxells Equation to calculate leakage
inductance of transformer as well as its eddy current
loss; Van et al. [ 5 ] calculated leakage inductance and ac
winding resistance of transformer by using short-circuit
impedance; Ho et al. [6] made use of partial inductance
method to calculate leakage and magnetising inductance
of transformer; and James et al. [7] proposed a matrix
circuit analysis method for calculations of self and
mutual inductance of transformer. The above
suggestions though provide some ways of inductance
calculations; they all need to take a great effort in
computations involving some complicated functions,
such as elliptic integrals.
To simplify calculations of inductance involving some
cumbersome and tedious computations, Grover
published a handbook [8] that includes a collection of
formulas and tables for calculation of inductance with a
Power Electronics and Variable Speed Drives, 18-19 September 2000, Conference Publication No. 475 0 IEE 2000
69
number of different conductor configurations. In this
handbook, the formulas are usually accurate only within
a limited range of design parameters for engineers or
designers, because the computation usually makes use
of interpolations in lookup tables for answer that is
supposed to be highly non-linear.
Dowel1 [9] presented a leakage inductance for solenoid
inductor. This method has produced very reliable
results for high frequency DC/DC converter and has
been adopted by many papers [IO-111. However, his
method is usually for low permeability material and the
leakage field is one-dimensional.
This paper is to present a fast numerical method for
inductance calculations that is applicable to magnetic
component with spiral shape, the method is similar to
Ref [12], where the current is assumed to flow in the
exact center of the conductor. Then an expression for
the self inductance of each turn comprising the inductor,
and the mutual inductance between turns on the same
layer of the inductor are developed. As a consequence, a
formula deriving the leakage inductance is obtained.
However, the computations of self and mutual
inductance proposed in this paper make use of a
simplified Neumanns formula, which eliminates the
involvement of solving elliptic integrals. The next
sections introduced the spiral transformer and the
simplification of Neumanns formula, then experimental
measurements was made to compare the calculation
results.
2. AIR CORE SPIRAL TRANSFORMER
The simplified Neumanns formula used to calculate the
self and mutual inductance of a spiral transformer that
offers several excellent advantages including higher
coupling coefficient, easy fabrication and low leakage
inductance. Hence it was used as pulse transformer for
gate signal circuit [13], and recently a further
development of this type of transformer into a high
frequency superconducting self-resonant transformer as
Fig. 1 was proposed in [ 141.
Inner diameter Outer diameter
_ -
Height
,JY
. -
Fig. 1 Air Core Transformer
The transformer is wounded in a bifilar manner . One where Aci is the vector potential produced by the current
turn per layer is used. ie The primary and secondary in Ci. d a(., is the area of element bounded by C,. Acj is
winding are in alternative layer. This structure has an given by:
advantage of low leakage field [13] which does not
produce any adverse effect or cause any international;
standards as it can be illustrated in Fig 2 where the mmf
diagram has an low magnitude compared to the structure (2)
of many tums per layer. The proposed transformer is Using the Neumann's Formula, we got
formed by interleaving of the primary and secondary
windings which causes the cancellation of the leakage
field. The transformer has been simulated using finite
element package. It has been further verified that the
leakage field is very weak.
where L[.,(,= inductance between coil C, and coil C,
The transformer height is equal to the conductor width. r, = radius of coil C,,
The isolation between the layers (windings) is a r, = radius of coil C, ,
polypropylene tape which has a thickness of 0.2". d< .dT, = (r,da)(r,d+)cos a , and
Since the leakage inductance of the proposed
transformer plays an important role in converter design,
The numerical method is used for the calculation of
leakage inductance, which was obtained by subtracting
mutual inductance of winding from self inductance of
the transformer.

primary secondary
d /
The solution involves a double integral, and we fust
extract the elliptic integral as follows:

mmf 8 .

Fig. 2 MMF in superconducting with spiral and 2

ri + r i
2
interleaved windings where k =-.
2riri
2.1 Self Inductance
Using a commercial computation package,
To calculate the self-inductance of a winding, we first Mathematica, the solution is given by:
simplify the spiral structure of the proposed transformer
into a number of circular coils as Fig. 3,
f ( k ) =-
4k EllipticK[
Jk-l 21
(5)
where EllipticK[m] and EllipticE[m] are complete
elliptic integral of the first kind K(m) and the second
kind E(m) respectively [15]. As the solution of the
integral is involved in Elliptic functions, which are long
and complicated power series, so it is cumbersome for
engineers to design the proposed transformer by using
Fig. 3 Circular Coil
(4).

Therefore, the function of k is plotted against log(k)

instead of k as shown in Fig. 4. It can be seen that the
figure shows a function behaving a straight line from
lo&) = 0.00001 to 0.1, and bending to zero as lo&)
approaches to 1 . Since the practical values of log@) lies

70
in between 0.0001 and 0.01, so that we approximated
the f(k) by g(k) as follows: Radius of outer coil, R,,l,,e,= 36.4"
Radius of inner coil, RI,, = 2 1.4"
g ( k ) = -1.5589 - 1.3765In(log(k)) number of turn, n = 19
(6) width of superconductor, w = 2.8"
Thickness of superconductor, T, = 0.28"
Air gap between adjacent coils, d,,,
Function of k
16 -
-r(k)
+ g(k)=Appmximatef(k) 1
12

0 --
000001 00001 0001 001 01 1
lop Ik )

Fig. 4 Functions ofAk) and g(k) winding

By replacing the functionAk)with g(k), the complicated

Neumann's formula can be approximated by (6). Fig. 5: Dimensions of Spiral Transformer

L(.,(., = po[-1.5589-1.3765In(log(k))
iq;
- (7) The material used is: 37 filament Ag Sheathed Bi-223
HTS. The critical current density is 5A/mm2 . The air-
gaps of the coils in fact are filled with polypropolene
Finally, the total self-inductance is summed up to n material. The self, mutual and leakage inductances
turns of winding as follow: calculated using (6)-(9) are compared to the
measurements taken with HP 4 194A Impedance/Gain
Phase Analyzer. The results are and tabulated in Table
1.

2.2 Mutual Inductance Table 1. Experiments and Calculations

The approach for calculation of the mutual inductance is I Calculated I Measured

similar to that for self-inductance, except Ci and C, are Self Inductance I 29.8pH I 30.48pH
different windings of the proposed transformer. The Mutual Inductance I 29.OpH I 29.8pH
total mutual inductance is therefore given by: Leakage Inductance I 800nH I 680nH
n n The readings in Table 1 show that the proposed
Lmutuu, = TATLC;(,,, for all i andj,
,=I /=I
(9) numerical method used in calculation of inductance of
coils or transformer can give results with a high
accuracy.
and the leakage inductance is therefore equal to Llk,

4. APPLICATIONS OF THE TRANSFORMER

Although the proposed transformer is not for the aim of

reduction of leakage inductance. In fact, the transformer
3. EXPERIMENTS
is used in a phase-shifted converter [1-21 which requires
certain value of leakage inductance for resonance. The
A spiral transformer is constructed as shown in the
accurate calculation of the inductance is therefore
cross-sectional diagram in Fig. 5 . It can be seen that the
important.
primary winding and the secondary winding are
wounded in an alternative manner. The dimensions of
the spiral transformer are listed as follows:

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The proposed project is to use superconductor to reduce
the converter loss. The magnetic material such as
Ferrites imposed a problem at liquid nitrogen
temperature because the permeability drops significantly
and the core loss is quite high [ 161. It is proposed to use
air-core transformer. However using air-core
transformer is a problem because the magnteising
inductance is small; the magnetising current increases
hence the loss of the transformer increases. It is
proposed to apply the method of resonance transformer
[I41 such that the transformer resonantes with an
external capacitance. During resonance, the
magnetising current is small, the primary current is
therefore reduced. Using superconducting material can
further reduce the loss to very small eventhough the
number of turns of the air-core transformer may be
large. The magnetising impedance, the resistive and
reactive magnetising components as specified in Section
3 are plotted against the switching frequency
I imooooo
IO 100 1x1 100 110 3m 310
rmp.r,(km)
(ruth-
Fig. 6 Magnetizing inductance of the proposed
transformer
The proposed transformer is now used in a phase-shifted
converter [17]. This converter consists of an inverter
bridge and a converter bridge which are connected in
cascade through the proposed transformer. The
optimum efficiency of 89% can be obtained at 17OW.
At this output power, the current density in the
transformer winding is less than 5Nmm2. The leakage
filed is also small and hence does not affect the
superconductor specification of the critical field. The
efficiency of the transformer is near to 100% because of
no conductor loss and core loss.
I I I
Figure 7: Phase-shifted DC/DC converter
5. CONCLUSIONS
The paper has presented a useful numerical method for
inductance calculation of magnetic components used in
power electronic circuit. The presented formulation,
based on Neumanns method, is very easily to be
computed. Elliptic function was used to simplify the
computation. The computational results show how the
leakage inductance can be estimated accurately. The
proposed method has been used for the design of a
superconductingresonant transformer. This transformer
has a characteristic of low magnetizing inductance but
low magnetizing current. The transformer has been
applied in a phase-shifted DC/DC converter. The
leakage inductance can therefore be estimated with
confidence and hence the resonance characteristics can
be obtained accurately.
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Im m o
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