Simulation of high temperature superconductors and experimental validation

Abstract

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.