Implementation of virtual work principle in virtual air gap

In this paper, an implementation of virtual work principle in virtual air gap is proposed for the calculation of contact and body forces. To calculate the proper values of the magnetic field at virtual air-gap, we exploit the generalized magnetic source methods. It is shown that appropriately sized virtual elements can be allocated in the virtual air-gap by one-dimensionally extending the virtual gap while keeping the previously calculated field intensity. Both an element's and total forces can be obtained by virtual distortion of the concerned virtual elements. The proposed method provides a good accuracy even when the two contacting objects have the different permeability. As a validation, numerical examples are presented for the force distribution and total force.