Towards analysis-aware geometry defeaturing for inception voltage predictions

Abstract: Defeaturing is routinely employed in numerical simulations of medium- and high-voltage equipment, not only to reduce computational costs but also to make meshing possible. But the errors that this practice introduces in the predicted breakdown/inception voltages are currently neglected. This work presents a goal-oriented \textit{a posteriori} error estimation framework that aims at assessing such defeaturing errors in inception voltage computations. The methodology combines a first-order approximation of the inception voltage error with dual-weighted residual estimators, providing an error bound that quantifies the impact of defeaturing on the simulation results. The approach builds upon the streamer integral model for inception voltage prediction and uses the recently proposed certified goal-oriented analysis-aware defeaturing estimator of~[1] for elliptic PDEs. The first-order approximation of the inception voltage is a linear functional J of the background electric field whose definition involves a line integral along the critical field line, and is therefore only of low regularity. To meet the abstract regularity assumption of the goal-oriented theory, we introduce a Gaussian mollification of J. The methodology is illustrated on a pin-plate benchmark with a small protrusion of varying size and shape, using a single shared adaptive mesh and an adaptive coupling of the mollification width to the local mesh size in order to ensure that the defeaturing error dominates over the discretization and the regularization errors.