Samarium : Frequently asked questions

Samarium

Frequently asked questions

General questions about Samarium's features

What kind of motors can Samarium design?

Samarium can design permanent-magnet surface-mounted brushless DC three-phase motors. It can design outer and inner rotor motors. It can also design slotted and slotless motors.

Samarium can design buried magnet motors only with spoke type orientation. Samarium cannot design motors with a different number of phases.

What kind of magnet geometry does Samarium support?

Samarium supports ring, arc, and breadloaf magnets for inner rotating motors. For outer rotating motors, ring and arc magnets are supported.

Are multi-pole ring magnets supported?

Yes, any number of magnet poles can be specified. The practicality of magnetizing the permanent magnet is not considered.

Questions about FEA

What kind of elements are available in Samarium for finite-element analysis?

Samarium produces constrained Delaunay triangulations. First, second, and third order triangles can be generated.

Does Samarium support parallel processing of FEA?

Parallel processing can be optionally used when generating a series of FEA runs or steps with certain parameters changing at each step.

For example, the rotor may be rotated by 180 degrees in steps of 5 degrees. This results in 36 separate steps. Four separate threads can be started, meaning that each one will only have to work on 9 steps, significantly speeding up the process. This is useful only when the computer running Samarium supports and is populated with multiple processors and / or multi-core processors. If incorrectly used, this will not result in any time being saved.

What is the optimal number of threads for FEA?

Samarium currently supports a maximum of four threads. The maximum recommended number of threads varies depending on the number of processor cores available:

One single-core processor = 1 thread
One dual-core processor = 2 threads
Two single-core processors = 2 threads
One quad-core processor = 4 threads
Two dual-core processors = 4 threads
Four single-core processors = 4 threads

Questions about the user interface language

How can the UI language be changed?

The current version of Samarium is always installed with an English interface. To change the language, follow these steps (you will only have to do this once, unless you want to change the language multiple times):

Samarium Language menu

Open the "Tools" menu (on Samarium's main menu bar) and place your mouse cursor over the "Language" entry. The list of available UI languages will be shown. The name of each language may not display correctly if the corresponding font is missing from your system. Use the flags as a reference if required.
This example shows the procedure to change the UI language from English to Japanese. Once a different language has been selected, you will be instructed (in the selected language) to restart the application. Save all your work (if necessary) and shut down Samarium.
After closing Samarium, use Windows Explorer to navigate to the Samarium installation folder (ex., "C:\Program Files\Samarium").
Open the "Settings" sub-folder (ex., "C:\Program Files\Samarium\Settings") and locate the appropriate language file with the ".reg" extension (in this case it would be "SamariumBCG_JPN.reg").
Double-click on this file (or right-click and select "Merge") so the required settings are written to the registry. If Windows Explorer asks for confirmation, click "Yes".

You can now restart Samarium in the newly selected language. Some customizations may be lost during this procedure but can be preserved if the "Settings" are saved to disc before another language change.

Samarium language change message: Please restart the application

Note: administrative privileges will be required to install Samarium, and to write the new language file to the registry.

Questions about license files

How are license files used to authorize Samarium?

Licensing Samarium involves running a small hardware signature gathering application on your PC. We will make the license files for your PC based on the results. Instructions on how to authorize Samarium will be sent along with the license files.

Please ensure that there are no additional or unwanted devices connected to your PC when running the hardware signature application. If the hardware signature is not the same when Samarium tries to run, it will not function correctly. It is recommended that a dedicated computer be reserved for running Samarium.