Interaction of a magnetic dipole with a slowly moving electrically conducting plate

We report an analytical investigation of the force and torque acting upon a magnetic dipole placed in the vicinity of a moving electrically conducting nonmagnetic plate. This problem is relevant to contactless electromagnetic flow measurement in metallurgy and extends previous theoretical works (Thess et al., Phys Rev Lett 96:164501, 2006; New J Phys 9:299, 2007) to the case where the orientation of the magnetic dipole relative to the plate is arbitrary. It is demonstrated that, for the case of low magnetic Reynolds number, the three-dimensional distributions of the induced electric potential, of the eddy currents, and of the induced magnetic field can be rigorously derived. It is also shown that all components of the force and torque can be computed without any further approximation. The results of the present work serve as a benchmark problem that can be used to verify numerical simulations of more complex magnetic field distributions.