Numerical Methods for Accelerating Nonlinear 3D Electro-quasi-static Fieldsimulations

Project description

The simulation of electric field distributions on complex high-voltage electrical systems with nonlinear field control measures requires a modelling under electro-quasi-static assumptions. Due to the highly nonlinear current-voltage characteristics of the field control materials, time-domain solvers are more suitable than frequency-domain ones to simulate such field problems. Using implicit time integration techniques for numerical computations requires the repetitiv solution of high-dimensional and ill-conditioned nonlinear or, in the context of Newton-Raphson iterations, linear algebraic systems of equations. On modern high performance computing systems, the computation times of such simulations are still in the range of a few minutes up to several days. Within this research project, various mathmatical schemes and implementation techniques are being investigated to accelerate these simulations and make them more efficient. These techniques include the use of improved parallelized solvers for linear algebraic systems of equations based on modern domain decomposition schemes, deflation, multiple right-hand side and initial value generation techniques. In addition, suitable techniques for dedicated hardware accelerators such as graphics processing units (GPGPUs -- General Purpose Graphics Processor Units) are being investigated. The research work will be implemented into the chair's in-house developed simulation tool MEQSICO (Magneto-/Electro-Quasistatic Simulation COde). The efficiency of the individual measures is verfied and documented against a comprehensive catalog of benchmark problems in each case.

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