The permanent magnet hypothesis: an intuitive approach to designing non-circular magnet arrays with high field homogeneity

Does the Halbach magnetization rotation rule that is used for designing circular magnet arrays for achieving the best homogeneity hold also for an elliptical or other non-circular cross-section? In this article, it is shown that a new numerically optimized magnetization rotation rule can provide more than three orders of magnitude improvement in field homogeneity as compared to a Halbach configuration for elliptical systems. Further it is demonstrated that such optimized magnetization rules can be easily derived in an intuitive way by studying virtual permanent magnets of a similar cross-section as the desired magnet array. This is coined as a permanent magnet hypothesis. Finally, it is shown that the applicability of this technique is not limited to circular or elliptical systems but can be applied to any arbitrarily shaped cross-section.

Automated summary

In this article, the applicability of the Halbach magnetization rotation rule in elliptical or other non-circular cross-sections is studied. It is shown that a numerically optimized magnetization rotation rule can significantly improve the field homogeneity compared to a Halbach configuration. The study also demonstrates the use of a permanent magnet hypothesis for deriving the optimized magnetization rules based on virtual permanent magnets of similar cross-section.