165

Volume Optimization for a Single-Phase Air-Core Reactor – 2D Finite Element Method and Particle Swarm Optimization Approach

Jeylto Alves de Souza Cruvinel, José Roberto Camacho

Alternative Energies and Electric Systems Protection Laboratory – LEAPSE Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Universidade Federal de Uberlândia (UFU), Santa Monica Campus – Uberlândia, Minas Gerais (Brazil)

2026-01-20

This paper describes the optimization of an air core reactor using Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) combined with the finite element analysis. The aim is to reduce material volume costs in manufacturing and maintenance. PSO is a nature-inspired optimization algorithm that simulates swarm behavior in search of the best solution in a multidimensional search space.
This article employs the PSO optimization method as an initial contribution to the design of single-phase air-core reactors, suggesting the possibility of further studies comparing its efficacy with other heuristic algorithms on the subject in the future.

Key words: Air Core Reactor, Particle Swarm Optimization, Finite Element Method, Optimization, Volume Reduction.

[1] D. Caverly et al., “Air core reactors: Magnetic clearances, electrical connection, and grounding of their supports”, in Minnesota Power Systems Conference, vol. 1, Minneapolis, Apr. 2017, pp. 1–24.

[2] K. Papp, M. R. Sharp, and D. F. Peelo, “High voltage dry-type air-core shunt reactors”, e i Elektrotechnik und Informationstechnik, vol. 131, pp. 349–354, 2014.

[3] L. Hu and A. Palazzolo, “An enhanced axisymmetric solid element for rotor dynamic model improvement”, Journal of Vibration and Acoustics, vol. 141, no. 5, p. 051 002, 2019.

[4] “A survey of penalty techniques in genetic algorithms”, in Proceedings of IEEE international Conference on Evolutionary Computation, May 1996. DOI: 10.1109/ICEC.1996.542704.

[5] Z. Zhang, Antenna Design for Mobile Devices, 2nd ed. Wiley-IEEE Press, 2017, ISBN: 978-1-119- 13232-5.

[6] J. Kennedy and R. Eberhart. Particle swarm optimization. In Proceedings of ICNN’95 - International Conference on Neural Networks, volume 4, 1942–1948 vol.4. 1995.

[7] Z. -H. Zhan, J. Zhang, Y. Li and H. S. -H. Chung, "Adaptive Particle Swarm Optimization," in IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, Part B (Cybernetics), vol. 39, no. 6, pp. 1362-1381, Dec. 2009, doi: 10.1109/TSMCB.2009.2015956.