Massively Parallel Computation for 3-D Nonlinear Finite Edge Element Problem With Transmission Line Decoupling Technique.

Transmission line method (TLM) has been used in 2-D scalar finite-element (FE) analysis due to its parallelism and constant admittance matrix. In this paper, the TLM is extended for the 3-D nonlinear vector FE problem that is more widely used for electromagnetic apparatus in practice. TLM is specially adapted for tetrahedron edge elements to calculate quasi-static electromagnetic field distribution for eddy current problems, and a dummy scalar gauge is applied to make the reduced magnetic vector FE formulation full-ranked and uniquely solvable by TLM. For each element, the nonlinearity is separated by transmission lines and only local small-scale Newton–Rapson iteration is needed, which is suitable for massive parallelization due to the independence between different elements. The TLM is implemented on a many-core GPU for a nonlinear FE power inductor case study, and the comparison of the results with a commercial FE software shows over 50 times speedup with a relative error of less than 2%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]