Estimation of iron losses in Terfenol-D for variable DC-biased and AC excitation conditions

Giant magnetostrictive material (GMM) is well known for its hysteresis behaviors related to multiple influencing factors, such as bias magnetic field and excitation level. This feature greatly challenges the loss prediction of giant magnetostrictive transducers. The existing loss prediction models need further improvement to cover the sensitive magnetic properties of GMM. In this paper, the variations of the iron losses with the operation conditions are interpreted by the variations of the Jiles–Atherton model parameters, and a concise parameter identification procedure with great generalizability is proposed. The iron losses of Terfenol-D under variable excitation levels and the DC biases are further investigated. With the proposed procedure, the introduced eight additional modification parameters for the original Jiles–Atherton model are easy to obtain, and merely a few hysteresis loops of Terfenol-D are involved. An experimental setup is established for further demonstration. Comparisons between the measured and calculated results indicate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. Throughout the bias-excitation space within the frequency range under investigation, the iron losses can be precisely estimated with an acceptable error of less than 5%.