Abstract
The growing interest in modeling superconductors has led to the development of increasingly effective numerical models and software. Alongside this interest, the question of how to teach and to explain the operation of superconductors to students has arisen. Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL) and Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) have created a series of web applications based on COMSOL Multiphysics that are publicly accessible through a web server called AURORA. Users can change the values of several parameters of the applications and observe the influence on the results. This article describes part of the currently available applications and some exercises that can be done with them.
Highlights
In confronting the growing necessity of innovative teaching methods, it is necessary to consider the needs of students and the educational system of today
In Roman mythology, Aurora was the goddess of the dawn who flew across the sky at sunrise, opening the path to the Sun and a new day*
The possibility of using applications for educational purposes allows demonstrating complex phenomena with a user-friendly interface. It leverages a straightforward and visual teaching method to raise interest in students and allows them to have a glimpse at the potential impact that superconductivity can have in the world
Summary
In confronting the growing necessity of innovative teaching methods, it is necessary to consider the needs of students and the educational system of today. Where Ba = |Ba|uz is the uniform external magnetic field along the z-axis direction (outward the paper), ∂Ω is the boundary of the superconducting domain and n the outward normal vector to the boundary In this application, equations (1) and (3) are solved using four time-dependent and coupled nonlinear partial differential equations (PDE module in COMSOL [3]). Differently from the H formulation, the use of an integral equation for the state variable current density allows simulating only the superconductor’s domain, without the need of simulating the vacuum around it This greatly reduces the number of degrees of freedom of the problem. A visual representation of how this results as the limit of the current distribution in a rectangular conductor as its thickness approaches zero can be found in [16] This applications allows simulating the same cases as the H formulation, but for the specific geometry of a thin superconductor. A detailed description of this application and of the model implementation can be found in a dedicated open-access publication [17], which includes the discussion of four representative cases
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