BEM: Opening the new frontiers in the industrial products design

Abstract

Thanks to the advances in numerical analysis achieved in the last several years, BEM became a powerful numerical technique for the industrial products design. Until recent time this technique has been recognized in a praxis as a technique offering from one side some excellent features (2D instead of 3D discretization, treatment of the open-boundary problems, etc.), but from the other side having some serious practical limitations, mostly related to the full-populated, often ill-conditioned matrices. The new, emerging numerical techniques like MBIT (Multipole-Based Integral Technique), ACA (Adaptive Cross-Approximations), DDT (Domain-Decomposition Technique) seems to bridge some of these known bottlenecks, promoting those the BEM in a high-level tool for even daily-design process of 3D real-world problems. The aim of this contribution is to illustrate the application of BEM in the design process of the complex industrial products like power transformers or switchgears. We shall discuss some numerical aspects of both single-physics problems appearing in the Dielectric Design (Electrostatics) and multi-physics problems characteristic for Thermal Design (coupling of Electromagnetic - Heat transfer) and Electro- Mechanical Design (coupling of Electromagnetic - Structural mechanics).