Optimization of the magnetic shield of a levitation melting device

In this paper, the optimization of the shielding of an axisymmetric levitation melting system is performed by means of the Particle Swarm Optimization algorithm. A non-standard Hybrid FEM-BEM is used to deal with the unbounded nature of the electromagnetic field problem and to reduce the computing effort required for optimization. The shape of the shield is derived by using Bèzier curves. Moreover, for each analyzed configuration, the equilibrium position of the workpiece to be melted is determined by means of a Newton-Raphson algorithm.