Pywinding: An Open-Source Tool for the Design and Simulation of Multilayer Induction Microcoils

Induction microcoils are valued for their simplicity, sensitivity, and cost effectiveness across a wide range of applications in biomedical instrumentation. The design of compact application-specific multilayer coils using permeable magnetic cores is a challenge that often requires multiple hardware iterations. This paper presents a simulation software tool for the evaluation of induction microcoil designs. Built upon the well known open-source Finite Element Method Magnetics software package, the tool allows users to rapidly simulate the magnetic and electrical characteristics of multilayer induction microcoils in response to a time-varying magnetic field. The tool is written in the python programming language and allows multiple simulations to be executed concurrently thus enabling the users to perform parameter sweeps of a coil design. The tool is validated against a set of custom induction microcoils with coil esistance, inductance and sensitivity simulated to within 3%, 22% and 11% of the experimentally measured values respectively. The tool is freely available on GitHub and PyPI software repositories.