Navigating Multi-Rate, Electrothermal Simulation Constraints

An automatic method is developed to vary thermal domain simulation time step based on an internal, simulation signal. The study addresses how thermal models can contain many states and, thus, require high computational effort for evaluation. In the context of coupled, electrothermal simulation, the proposed strategy manipulates the thermal domain time step as function of the rate of change of the electrical-to-thermal coupling signal. Throughout simulation investigations it is demonstrated how 90% reductions in computational effort are achievable with the method. Overall, the down-sampling control approach allows electrothermal coupled simulation accuracy and computational effort to be traded off according to specifications and computational hardware limits.