A dual-primal finite-element tearing and interconnecting method combined with tree-cotree splitting for modeling electromechanical devices

The dual-primal finite-element tearing and interconnecting (FETI-DP) method is combined with the tree-cotree splitting (TCS) method to expand the capability and improve the efficiency of the finite-element analysis of electromechanical devices. With the FETI-DP method, an original large-scale problem is decomposed into smaller subdomain problems and parallel computing schemes are then employed to reduce the computation time significantly. The TCS method is adopted to deal with the low-frequency breakdown problem, which often accompanies the finite-element analysis of electromechanical problems. On the basis of the computed magnetic field values, the force is computed with the use of the Maxwell stress tensor method. The proposed technique is applied to solve both high-contrast magnetostatic problems and eddy-current problems. Results are compared with both measurement data and brute-force finite-element calculations without domain decomposition. Comprehensive tests are conducted to investigate the parallel efficiency and numerical scalability. The results show that the proposed method can achieve a good parallel efficiency and an excellent numerical scalability with respect to the number of subdomains and the size of the problem. Copyright (c) 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.