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The purpose of this paper is the derivation and efficient implementation of surface impedance boundary conditions (SIBCs) for nonlinear magnetic conductors.

An approach based on perturbation theory is proposed, which expands to nonlinear problems the methods already developed by the authors for linear problems. Differently from the linear case, for which the analytical solution of the diffusion equation in the semi-infinite space for the magnetic field is available, in the nonlinear case the corresponding nonlinear diffusion equation must be solved numerically. To this aim, a suitable smooth map is defined to reduce the semi-infinite computational domain to a finite one; then the diffusion equation is solved by a Galerkin method relying on basis functions constructed via the push-forward of a Lagrangian polynomial basis whose degrees of freedom are collocated at Gauss–Lobatto nodes. The use of such basis in connection with a suitable under-integration naturally leads to mass-lumping without impacting the order of the method. The solution of the diffusion equation is coupled with a boundary element method formulation for the case of parallel magnetic conductors in terms of E and B fields.

The results are validated by comparison with full nonlinear finite element method simulations showing very good accordance at a much lower computational cost.

Limitations of the method are those arising from perturbation theory: the introduced small parameter must be much less than one. This implies that the penetration depth of the magnetic field into the magnetic and conductive media must be much smaller than the characteristic size of the conductor.

The efficient implementation of a nonlinear SIBC based on a perturbation approach is proposed for an electric and magnetic field formulation of the two-dimensional problem of current driven parallel solid conductors.

To provide a time domain formulation for reconstruction of transient currents flowing in massive parallel conductors from magnetic data collected in the dielectric space surrounding the conductors.

A boundary integral equation (BIE) formulation involving Mitzner's and Rytov's high order surface impedance boundary conditions (SIBCs) is used. Input data of the inverse problem are the magnetic fields at given locations near the conductors. In order to validate the inversion algorithm, the magnetic field data are computed solving the direct problem with FEM for given current waveforms.

The improvement in reconstruction accuracy of the new time domain BIE formulation employing high order SIBCs has been demonstrated numerically in a simple test case. The range of validity of the technique has been extended to current pulses of longer duration and the computational burden has shown to increase only by a factor of 4.

The proposed formulation can be compared with other possible formulations, both in the time and in the frequency domain.

Based on this formulation a new current sensing technique is proposed for realization of low cost current sensors based on magnetic sensor arrays.

The inverse problem addressed in the paper has been solved for the first time.