A BETL application for electrostatic simulations

This is a very simple example of an electrostatic simulation. The according boundary value problem corresponds to an outer Dirichlet problem for the Laplace equation. The Model depicts an electric device which consists of six electrodes surrounded by a grounding box. The grounding box as well as five electrodes feature a zero voltage. The remaining Electrode contains a fixed voltage unequal to zero. The left model within the table below shows the initial setup. There, the electrode carrying the non-zero voltage is marked in red while all grounded parts are coloured in blue.

Note that the voltage is nothing but a potential by what it can be identified as the Dirichlet datum. The visualisation on the right hand side shows the computed Neumann data on the surface. From a physical point of view the Neumann data correspond to the electric field strength. The electric field strength is important to know since in the end it determines the design of the electric device.

In this example the computational mesh consists of about 60000 curved triangular elements. The computation of the involved boundary layer potentials was done by help of the AHMED library.

The grounding box provides no essential additional information to the computational result. For this reason, in the visualisation it has been replaced by a wire-frame. This enables a better view inside the electric device. Now, one easily detects all the inner electrodes - especially the one which carries the non-zero potential. Clearly, this electrode features also the maximum electric field strength.

Please visit the BETL documentation (html, pdf) for more information.