The optimum design of electrode and insulator contours by nonlinear programming using the surface charge simulation method

A new method is presented for optimizing electrode and insulator contours. The contours are modified by using the iteration methods of nonlinear programming until the desired electric field distribution is obtained. The Gauss-Newton, quasi-Newton, conjugate gradient, or steepest descent method is used for the iteration. The electric-field distributions are computed by means of the surface charge simulation method. It is shown that the Gauss-Newton method gives very fast convergence.<
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