Real-Time Electromagnetic Visualisation for Large 3D Accelerated Models

Previous work has shown that real-time electromag-netic models can be used to enable an augmented reality-based visualisation of the magnetic field around a single wire over a ground plane. However, as model complexity is increased, the memory usage and simulation times increase considerably, to the point that it would be impossible to use in a real-time visualisation. In this paper, previous efforts are substantially improved by incorporating the Fast Multipole formulation of the Partial Element Equivalent Circuit method alongside the PRIMA model order reduction algorithm. A significantly larger model with 11156 ODEs has been simulated in real-time for smooth augmented reality visualisations. Experimental measurements are used to validate the accuracy of the simulation models used.

I. Introduction

Part of designing power electronic systems is understanding its electromagnetic behaviour, but these effects are not intuitive to understand. The traditional solution to this problem is visualisation of electromagnetic effects using finite element software to both predict the electromagnetic fields for a particular operating point and render these onto a virtual representation of the design. This process is typically slow and the field visualisation is generated in the frequency domain for a static operating point which makes it difficult to visualise how the fields change as a system operating point changes. For thermal effects, thermal imaging cameras are available which do allow real-time visualisation of thermal effects, overlaid onto a video feed of a real system, and responding to changes in system operating point. No such technology exists for electromagnetic effects.