Objectives  In the numerical calculation of steel plate induction heating, the electromagnetic thermal coupling method is usually adopted. Although the results obtained by this method are accurate, the built model is complex and requires vast number of calculations and computational time. Therefore,

  Methods  a new simplified method is proposed based on computations and deductions, replacing the complex electromagnetic thermal coupling calculation with a spatial function mode of heat source model. A finite element model of a steel plate for static induction heating is built using COMSOL Multi-physics software. Then the regular electromagnetic thermal coupling method and the simplified method are both applied to calculate the temperature field of a heated steel plate, and the temperature distributions gained by these two methods are compared to verify the reliability in heat source model application.

  Results  The result shows that the proposed method applied to heat source model is reliable.

  Conclusions  Compared with the electromagnetic thermal coupling method, the computational time can be effectively reduced by using this method to calculate the induction heating process of a steel plate, and the calculation of mobile heating can be solved effectively.