POLOPT: Numerical Simulation of Electric Fields

In this joint project with Asea Brown Boveri's Corporate Research Center Baden/Switzerland , various HPC architectures are being investigated with regard to the design of high voltage systems. ABB's in house code POLOPT is constantly being adapted to and optimised for novel high perofrmance computing architectures.

Particular areas of interest are the simulation of the electrostatic and electromagnetic field distribution in critical regions of transformers, high voltage insulators, or circuit-breakers in order to be able to detect potential constructional  faults during the development process.

For the numeric simulation of the field distribution the so-called Boundary-Element Method has been utilised. In this method, a linear equation system with a fully populated matrix is solved with the iterative GMRES solver. Typical orders of magnitude for the equation system are 104 to 106 unknowns. The algorithm has been parallelised using the Message Passing programming model, particularly using  MPI.

The first parallel versions ran on UNIX workstation clusters or large parallel mainframe computers.

Example: Field Simulation for a Transformer Outlet

CAD Model as obtained from the construction department (left) and field distribution (right)