An Adaptive Time-Stepping Finite Element Method With Schur-Complement Preconditioning for Surge Simulation of Magnetic Components

Surge over-voltages may induce magnetic saturation, flux instability in power components and undermining reliability. To address trade-off between computational efficiency and accuracy of the fixed-step finite element method (FEM) under transients, this paper presents an adaptive time-stepping FEM (ATS-FEM) driven by higher-order truncation-error estimation, with Schur complement preconditioning integrated to optimize memory usage for accelerating parallel matrix solution. Three typical magnetic components often used in strong magnetic launch and propulsion systems are simulated and validated in comparison with that of commercial software. It is shown that our developed ATS-FEM can dynamically adjust the time steps but with high numerical accuracy maintained, and it also has the capability for capturing localized saturation, radial gradients, and permeability drops in high-current regions of the magnetic components.