This presentation was held at the 2020 NAFEMS UK Conference "Inspiring Innovation through Engineering Simulation". The conference covered topics ranging from traditional FEA and CFD, to new and emerging areas including artificial intelligence, machine learning and EDA.

Resource Abstract

Aerospace industry is driving more electric solutions to support aviation sustainability.

As part of the journey towards electrification, industry needs large scale fast and efficient coupled multi-physics simulations. High Performance Computing (HPC) along with iterative solution schemes offer means of achieving this.

Under the EPSRC funded ASiMoV project, Rolls Royce plc is working with a number of partners to develop a coupled electro-thermo-mechanical simulation capability for large scale engineering systems.

Electromagnetic phenomena are most commonly formulated and solved using the finite element method (FEM). Based on the operating frequency, electric machine problems can be categorized into eddy current and magnetostatic.

Here, 3D electromagnetic eddy-current problems are investigated within the finite element framework of computing platform FEniCS. Simulation speed is addressed by the use of parallel iterative sparse solvers in a High Performance Computing environment.

The numerical procedure involves solving the time harmonic Maxwell's equations by means of the Coulomb gauged magnetic vector potential A and the electric scalar potential V (known as the A-V formulation). The numerical method as well as the implementation within FEniCS is described. The weak formulation derived in FEniCS for the integration of the Maxwell's equations is also presented.

After briefly presenting the numerical procedure, this paper will focus on the models that have been implemented using FEniCS open-source computing platform. A brief description of the models will be given as well as the main results obtained. For each test case, some results, especially current density and magnetic flux density predictions at different frequencies have been extracted and qualitatively compared to the associated reference model that is implemented using commercial off the shelf software (e.g. OPERA 3D - Simulia by Dassault Systemes®).

In the future new features will be implemented and further cases implemented to cover wider aspects of electromagnetic modelling and addressing parallel scalability in HPC systems.