Preconditioning of the second‐kind boundary integral equations for 3D eddy current problems

Abstract

AbstractStarting from the time‐harmonic Maxwell equations at low‐frequency eddy current approximation the H–ϕ formulation is presented. An equivalent system of boundary integral equations of the second kind on the conductor surface (resp. the conductor/dielectric) is derived. Discretizing these equations with a boundary element method (BEM) yields a block linear equation system \[ \left[\begin{array}{cc} A_{1} & B_{1} \\ \tfrac{\mu}{\mu_{0}}\tilde{B}_{2} & A_{2}\end{array} \right] \left( \begin{array}{c} j \\ \sigma \end{array} \right)=\left(\begin{array}{c} b_{1} \\ b_{2}\end{array} \right) \] with a fully populated stiffness matrix. This system is non‐symmetric and, for large μ/μ0 (of interest in practice) ill‐conditioned. Iterative solvers like GMRES converge very slowly, in general. We propose a new preconditioner which depends on μ. We present numerical results with a serial and parallel version of this preconditioner also on large industrial eddy current problems with compex geometry. The performance of preconditioned GMRES is found to be practically independent of μ/μ0. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.