Mortaring Methods for Thin Shell Approximations of Insulation Layers of CERN’s Superconducting Magnets
Master thesis, Bachelor thesis
Superconducting magnets as e.g. used in particle colliders such as the LHC at CERN exhibit complex transient magneto-thermal phenomena whose analysis requires appropriate numerical methods such as the finite element (FE) method. When using the latter, thin insulation layers can lead to numerical problems in Contact: thermal simulations due to their high aspect ratios.
To circumvent this problem, thin shell approximations collapsing the volumetric insulation layer into a surface can be used. However, without further considerations, these methods require the meshes on both sides of the shell to be conforming. In order to conveniently treat layer-to-layer insulation of superconducting magnets, a way to deal with non-conforming meshes is desirable.
Mortaring methods are a well-known possibility to cope with non-conforming meshes. Thus, this announcement proposes to implement mortaring for thin shell approximations in the open-source finite element framework GetDP.
