Michael Poole1, Hector Sanchez Lopez1, Adnan Trakic1, Stuart Crozier1
1ITEE, University of Queensland, Brisbane, QLD, Australia
Joule heating in gradient coils can raise their temperature and cause coil deformation, patient discomfort, passive shim heating and in some rare cases can result in failure of the gradient coil. A boundary element method with adaptive regularisation is presented to design coils with reduced maximum current density. Simulations indicate significantly reduced "hot spots" in gradient coils designed with the adaptive regularisation method. The method can also be used to design coils with higher efficiency for a given buildable wire separation and is particularly effective when space for the coil set is limited.