Busbar Induction Analysis with ANSYS Q3D Extractor

Hello everyone, Ian from Ozen Engineering here. I'm going to quickly run through how to simulate a busbar in ANSYS Q3D Extractor. I've already made a new project, given it a name, and inserted a Q3D design. I'll quickly construct the busbar just using a polyline that I'll give a cross-section to.

Cross-section in the properties, I'll make it rectangular and give it some width and height. There's one complete. Move it away for now. Now I'll create the centerline, basic straight, same cross-section, and I'll mirror this over this.

Now it automatically assigned the material for all these lines as copper. So I'm going to go ahead and make these, you know, my three different nets. Nets are any small metals that are physically touching, right?

So an aluminum strip or maybe like some copper weld, welded to steel or something similar to that. We're also going to add in our terminals. Terminals are your inputs or outputs for your nets. So those can be either sinks or sources.

In Q3D, any of your nets can have as many sources as you want, but they can only have one single sink. The other thing to keep in mind is when you're solving for capacitance, you only need net information. If you're solving for your inductance, you need nets and terminals.

If you already have your design ready, imported, or created, and you've already assigned the materials, or if they've auto-assigned themselves, then you're ready to assign the nets. Just right on Nets and click on Auto. It's going to find the three structures right away.

It knows they're defined as copper, so it automatically defines these as nets, and you can see these three nets appear. And like I mentioned, if you only want to solve capacitance, then you pretty much already set. Maybe you could rename the lines to nets just to make it easier on yourself.

Other than that, you're set for capacitance calculations. You can still at this point change the materials if you'd like. For example, we can select on this net and make it another material if you want. We'll go ahead and make it aluminum, for example. Quickly rename these, okay.

We'll go ahead and assign the terminals to these nets. This has to be done in face mode, so I can change my selection mode up here to face or just click the F key, and I'll select the front of this, right-click, assign, in this case, source, click OK, and I'll do that to my other ones as well.

Source. Now these have to be assigned on faces with an exception. If you were to take this object and assign, you can see this mesh operation. There is a boundary condition, this thin conductor boundary condition.

These can be applied to sheets, so if you have a thin conductor boundary condition applied, you can actually add a terminal to an edge of a net rather than to a face. Turning the model around so I can add my sinks. Select here.

Excitation, sink1, sink2, and sink 3. Last thing to do is add a solution setup. We can right-click analysis, add solution setup, and we'll leave all of this how it is except for the solution frequency. We can drop this down to the kilohertz range.

A quick note about these selections: The DC resistance and inductance calculation is going to be solved using the finite element method, whereas the AC resistance and inductance will be solved using the method of moments.

So, these are a little bit different in that the method of moments is a boundary integral method, which means it's only going to solve for occurrence on the surface of your conductors and dielectric interfaces. Luckily for us, Q3D takes care of the airbox automatically.

We can click OK, and we are ready to go. Last thing to do is right-click our setup and analyze. Let's plot the inductance. Right-click results, create a matrix report and a data table. Data table because we only have the single frequency that we simulated.

I'll take my DC inductance of, we'll do the self-inductance of this net, or we'll look at the self-inductance of all three. So we'll do net one, source one. The current flow is not surprising; we would expect that the AC has a lower value than the DC inductance because of the skin effect.

Transcription by Asma cube. Please be sure to correct any misspelled ANSYS product names as you transcribe, e.g., OptiSling should be optiSLang. The DC value, so single point at 0 GHz, as well as we'll do a log scale over a large frequency, like 1 to 1 MHz. Maybe like 10 samples. Okay, 62 points.

Click OK and reanalyze it. That should also finish pretty quickly. Let's plot the self-inductance, the DC inductance, and the AC inductance of one of the nets so that you can see the skin effect in action, for example.

So right-click, we'll do the same thing, and this time a rectangular plot because we have many frequencies to choose from. You can see all the different values. You can select specific values that you're interested in if you'd like.

And we'll do the DC of just that net one new report and the AC of that same thing, add trace. And here, as we expect to see, the DC is going to stay the same, but the AC inductance does decrease as frequency increases. We can change the scaling of this to make it a little easier to view if you want.

I just double-clicked on either of these axes. It opens up the properties of this graph, and on the scaling tab, we can change this from linear to log. And it really helps us see this behavior over this wider scale of frequencies. And that is going to be it for this one.

If you have any questions at all, feel free to leave them below. Don't forget to subscribe to see more simulation videos, and thank you for watching. Thank you for watching.