Limitations of Jiles–Atherton models to study the effect of hysteresis in electrical steels under different excitation regimes

Purpose The accurate modeling of magnetic hysteresis in electrical steels is important in several electrical and electronic applications. Numerical models have long been known that can correctly reproduce some typical behaviours of these magnetic materials. Among these, the model proposed by Jiles and Atherton must certainly be mentioned. This model is intuitive and fairly easy to implement and identify with relatively few experimental data. Also, for this reason, it has been extensively studied in different formulations. The developments and numerical tests made on this hysteresis model have indicated that it is able to accurately reproduce symmetrical cycles, especially the major loop, but often it fails to reproduce non-symmetrical cycles. This paper aims to show the positive aspects and highlight the defects of the different formulations in predicting the minor loops of electrical steels excited by non-sinusoidal currents. Design/methodology/approach The different formulations are applied to different electrical steels, and the data coming from the simulations are compared with those measured experimentally. The direct and inverse Jiles–Atherton models, including the introduction of the dissipative factor approach, are presented, and their limitations are proposed and validated using the measurements of three non-grain-oriented materials. Only the measured major loop is used to identify the parameters of the Jiles–Atherton model. Furthermore, the direct and inverse Jiles–Atherton models were used to simulate the minor loops as well as the hysteresis cycles with direct component (DC) bias excitation. Finally, the simulation results are discussed and compared to measurements for each study case. Findings The paper indicates that both the direct and the inverse Jiles–Atherton model formulations provide a good agreement with the experimental data for the major loop representation; nevertheless, both models can not accurately predict the minor loops even when the modification approaches proposed in the literature were implemented. Originality/value The Jiles–Atherton model and its modifications are widely discussed in the literature; however, some limitations of the model and its modification in the case of the distorted current waveform are not completely highlighted. Furthermore, this paper contains an original discussion on the accuracy of the prediction of minor loops from distorted current waveforms, including DC bias.