Resumen de Electric 3D‐simulation of metallized film capacitors Article Options and Tools

Jörg Ostrowski, Ralf Hiptmair, Henning Fuhrmann

• Purpose – This paper seeks to deal with the computation of time‐harmonic electric potentials, currents, and surface charge distributions inside self‐healing metallized film capacitors in three dimensions. A 50 Hz exciting voltage is applied at contacts.

  Design/methodology/approach – Extreme aspect ratios warrant dimensional reduction: the metallization is modelled as a 2D shell. This greatly reduces computational costs and makes possible an excellent resolution of the geometry. An integro‐differential equation for the complex amplitudes of the electric potential and surface charge densities on this shell is derived and discretized by means of boundary elements.

  Findings – Adaptive cross approximation and H‐matrix technology is employed for matrix compression and preconditioning of iterative solvers. This permits one to use fine surface meshes and achieve satisfactory accuracy as demonstrated in numerical experiments.

  Research limitations/implications – The model is based on an electroquasistatic approach; thus it is valid for low frequencies only.

  Practical implications – Numerical experiments of sophisticated real‐life capacitor‐designs show the efficacy of the method for industrial applications.

  Originality/value – A novel model was developed and implemented for the 3D electric field computation inside metallized film capacitors in the frequency domain.