Introduction

The methods of modern industrial technology and product development have radically changed over the last two or three decades.They have swiftly evolved from exclusively based on on physical prototyping and gradual empirical improvements twenty years ago to relying to a large extent on virtual prototyping and mathematical optimization today. The main drivers for this process were and still are the need for high performance, quality, and low manufacturing and maintenance cost.

Computer simulations (above all filed simulations) relying on the enormous hardware and software development over the last twenty years made possible the mentioned methodological evolution of the product development. Due to their fast development pace, the novelties in the field of computer simulations could not be implemented fast enough in the modern educational systems for engineers resulting presently in the lack of simulation experts in the industry.

This book has the following three main purposes:

• to mitigate the above mentioned educational problem of simulations experts, i.e. to help the engineers already involved in the design process to acquire new simulation knowledge and successfully apply it in practice.
  
  
• to offer the solid basis of simulation knowledge to those bachelor, master, and PhD students of electrical engineering interested in field simulations, virtual prototyping, high performance computing, and design optimisation
  
  
• to demonstrate how to effectively perform different types of electromagnetic (EM) finite element (FE) analyses relevant for educational purposes as well as for practical problems of daily design
  

The book is organised as follows: Chapter 1 offers a review of the electromagnetic field theory relevant for the subsequent chapters dedicated to various simulation technologies. In this chapter the basic integral laws of the electromagnetic field theory, their differential forms, Maxwell equations and potentials are discussed in detail. Chapter 2 presents the theoretical basis of the Finite Element Method (FEM) for electromagnetic applications. The presented FEM theory is essential for preparing correct efficient simulation models, for mitigating simulation problems, and for assessing the quality and accuracy of the results obtained. The important simulation topics such as complexity, accuracy, central processing unit (CPU) time, memory requirements, mesh quality, interpolation order, and their correlation are discussed in this chapter. Chapters 0-8 are dedicated to different applications: electrostatic analysis, magnetostatic analysis, stationary current distribution, GCBs, electroquasistatic analysis, and wave propagation analysis. Chapter 9 concludes the book.

Every Chapter is related to one analysis type and starts with a mathematical description of the underlying Boudary Value Problem (BVP) that is to be solved  followed by the detailed explanation of the equations, material properties, and Boundary Conditions (BCs). The meaning of the presented equations is illustrated with a relatively simple but realistic example. After presenting the theoretical part each chapter is completed with several complicated and demanding simulation examples previously published in scientific papers. This combination of relatively simple educational examples at the beginning and demanding real-life examples at the end of each chapter should hopefully make the reading and learning more interesting and effective.

Content