A Galleria Boundary Element Method for two-dimensional nonlinear magnetostatics

Aaron D Brovont, Purdue University

Abstract

The Boundary Element Method (BEM) is a numerical technique for solving partial differential equations that is used broadly among the engineering disciplines. The main advantage of this method is that one needs only to mesh the boundary of a solution domain. A key drawback is the myriad of integrals that must be evaluated to populate the full system matrix. To this day these integrals have been evaluated using numerical quadrature. In this research, a Galerkin formulation of the BEM is derived and implemented to solve two-dimensional magnetostatic problems with a focus on accurate, rapid computation. To this end, exact, closed-form solutions have been derived for all the integrals comprising the system matrix as well as those required to compute fields in post-processing; the need for numerical integration has been eliminated. It is shown that calculation of the system matrix elements using analytical solutions is 15-20 times faster than with numerical integration of similar accuracy. Furthermore, through the example analysis of a c-core inductor, it is demonstrated that the present BEM formulation is a competitive alternative to the Finite Element Method (FEM) for linear magnetostatic analysis. Finally, the BEM formulation is extended to analyze nonlinear magnetostatic problems via the Dual Reciprocity Method (DRBEM). It is shown that a coarse, meshless analysis using the DRBEM is able to achieve RMS error of 3-6% compared to a commercial FEM package in lightly saturated conditions.

Degree

Ph.D.

Advisors

Pekarek, Purdue University.

Subject Area

Mechanics|Applied Mathematics|Electrical engineering|Electromagnetics

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