Simulation of High Temperature Superconductors and experimental validation

• Published in: Computer physics communications Vol. 237; pp. 154 - 167
• Main Authors: Olm, Marc, Badia, Santiago, Martín, Alberto F.
• Format: Journal Article Publication
• Language: English
• Published: Elsevier B.V 01.04.2019
• Subjects: Adaptive mesh refinement; Domain decomposition; Física; Física de l'estat sòlid; High temperature superconductors; High temperature superconductors Maxwell equations Adaptive mesh refinement Nédélec finite elements MPI parallelism Domain decomposition; Maxwell equations; MPI parallelism; Nédélec finite elements; Superconductors; Superconductors d'alta temperatura; Àrees temàtiques de la UPC; Nédélec finite elements; High temperature superconductors; MPI parallelism; Adaptive mesh refinement; Maxwell equations; Domain decomposition
• ISSN: 0010-4655; 1879-2944
• DOI: 10.1016/j.cpc.2018.11.021

In this work, we present a parallel, fully-distributed finite element numerical framework to simulate the low-frequency electromagnetic behaviour of superconducting devices, which efficiently exploits high performance computing platforms. We select the so-called H-formulation, which uses the magnetic field as a state variable. Nédélec elements (of arbitrary order) are required for an accurate approximation of the H-formulation for modelling electromagnetic fields along interfaces between regions with high contrast medium properties. An h-adaptive mesh refinement technique customized for Nédélec elements leads to a structured fine mesh in areas of interest whereas a smart coarsening is obtained in other regions. The composition of a tailored, robust, parallel nonlinear solver completes the exposition of the developed tools to tackle the problem. First, a comparison against experimental data is performed to show the availability of the finite element approximation to model the physical phenomena. Then, a selected state-of-the-art 3D benchmark is reproduced, focusing on the parallel performance of the algorithms.