Order Reduction of the Radiative Heat Transfer Model for the Simulation of Plasma Arcs

An approach to derive low-complexity models describing thermal radiation for the sake of simulating the behavior of electric arcs in switchgear systems is presented. The idea is to approximate the (high dimensional) full-order equations, modeling the propagation of the radiated intensity in space, with a model of much lower dimension, whose parameters are identified by means of nonlinear system identification techniques. The low-order model preserves the main structural aspects of the full-order one, and its parameters can be straightforwardly used in arc simulation tools based on computational fluid dynamics. In particular, the model parameters can be used together with the common approaches to resolve radiation in magnetohydrodynamic simulations, including the discrete-ordinate method, the P-N methods and photohydrodynamics. The proposed order reduction approach is able to systematically compute the partitioning of the electromagnetic spectrum in frequency bands, and the related absorption coefficients, that yield the best matching with respect to the finely resolved absorption spectrum of the considered gaseous medium. It is shown how the problem's structure can be exploited to improve the computational efficiency when solving the resulting nonlinear optimization problem. In addition to the order reduction approach and the related computational aspects, an analysis by means of Laplace transform is presented, providing a justification to the use of very low orders in the reduction procedure as compared with the full-order model. Finally, comparisons between the full-order model and the reduced-order ones are presented

Arc Simulation in Low Voltage Switching Devices, a Case Study

Arc simulations are becoming a valuable tool in the development of low voltage switching devices. Sim-ulations reveal physical quantities that are experimentally not accessible and help in the investigation of the underlying phenomena. However, the strong interaction between different processes and the intrinsic multi-scale nature of the problem, both in time and space, pose great challenges to accurate and efficient simulations. At ABB Corporate Research, we developed a simulation tool capable of simulating the be-havior of low voltage switchgear. To verify the accuracy and predictive capability of our platform, we validate the simulations by comparing their results with available experimental findings. After describing the tool, we provide here evidence of the good agreement between measured and simulated data on several commercial ABB devices

Modellreduktion thermischer Felder unter Berücksichtigung der Wärmestrahlung

Transiente Simulationen im Rahmen von Parameterstudien oder Optimierungsprozessen erfor-dern die Anwendung der Modellordnungsreduktion zur Minimierung der Berechnungs¬zeiten. Die aus der Wärmestrahlung resultierende Nichtlinearität bei der Analyse thermischer Felder wird hier als äußere Last betrachtet, wodurch die entkoppelte Ermittlung der strahlungs-beding¬ten Wärmeströme gelingt. Darüber hinaus ermöglichen die infolgedessen konstanten System¬matrizen die Reduktion des Temperaturvektors mit etablierten Verfahren für lineare Systeme, wie beispielsweise den Krylov-Unterraummethoden. Die aus der in der Regel großflächigen Verteilung der thermischen Lasten folgende hohe Anzahl von Systemeingängen limitiert allerdings die erzielbare reduzierte Dimension. Deshalb werden zustandsunabhängige, sich synchron verändernde Lasten zu einem Eingang zusammengefasst. Die aus der Strahlung resultierenden Wärmeströme sind im Gegensatz dazu durch die aktuelle Temperaturverteilung bestimmt und lassen sich nicht derart gruppieren. Vor diesem Hintergrund wird ein Ansatz basierend auf der Singulärwertzerlegung von aus Trai¬ningssimulationen gewonnenen Beispiellastvektoren vorgeschlagen. Auf diese Weise gelingt eine erhebliche Verringerung der Eingangsanzahl, sodass im reduzierten System ein sehr geringer Freiheitsgrad erreicht wird. Im Vergleich zur Proper Orthogonal Decomposition (POD) genügen dabei deutlich weniger Trainingsdaten, was den Rechenaufwand während der Offline-Phase erheblich vermindert. Darüber hinaus dehnt das entwickelte Verfahren die Gültigkeit des reduzierten Modells auf einen weiten Parameterbereich aus. Die Berechnung der strahlungsbedingten Wärmeströme in der Ausgangsdimension bestimmt dann den numerischen Aufwand. Mit der Discrete Empirical Interpolation Method (DEIM) wird die Auswertung der Nichtlinearität auf ausgewählte Modellknoten beschränkt. Schließlich erlaubt die Anwendung der POD auf die Wärmestrahlungsbilanz die schnelle Anpassung des Emissionsgrades. Somit hängt das reduzierte System nicht mehr vom ursprünglichen Freiheitsgrad ab und die Gesamt-simulationszeit verkürzt sich um mehrere Größenordnungen.Transient simulations as part of parameter studies or optimization processes require the appli-cation of model order reduction to minimize computation times. Nonlinearity resulting from heat radiation in thermal analyses is considered here as an external load. Thereby, the determi-nation of the radiation-induced heat flows is decoupled from the temperature equation. Hence, the system matrices become invariant and established algorithms for linear systems, such as Krylov Subspace Methods, can be used for the reduction of the temperature vector. However, in general the achievable reduced dimension is limited as the thermal loads distributed over large parts of the surface lead to a high number of system inputs. Therefore, state-independent, synchronously changing loads are combined into one input. In contrast, the heat flows resulting from radiation are determined by the current temperature distribution and cannot be grouped in this way. Against this background, an approach based on the singular value decomposition of snapshots obtained from training simulations is proposed allowing a considerable decreased input number and a very low degree of freedom in the reduced system. Compared to Proper Orthogonal Decomposition (POD), significantly less training data is required reducing the computational costs during the offline phase. In addition, the developed method extends the validity of the reduced model to a wide parameter range. The computation of the radiation-induced heat flows, which is performed in the original dimension, then determines the numerical effort. The Discrete Empirical Interpolation Method (DEIM) restricts the evaluation of the nonlinearity to selected model nodes. Finally, the application of the POD to the heat radiation equation enables a rapid adjustment of the emissivity. Thus, the reduced system is no longer dependent on the original degree of freedom and the total simulation time is shortened by several orders of magnitude