Large-scale and highly accurate magnetic field analysis of magnetic shield

This paper describes a large-scale and highly accurate magnetostatic field analysis targeting a magnetic shield. The hybrid finite element-boundary element method and the magnetic moment method do not require mesh division for the free space and can easily treat the nonlinearity of magnetic property. Therefore, these methods are considered very effective for the analysis of a magnetic shield which has a high aspect ratio of the size scale to the thickness. However, large memory and computational time have been required due to the dense matrices generated by those integral-based formulations. To overcome the difficulties, we introduce the fast multipole method into the hybrid method and the magnetic moment method. Furthermore, to achieve more reduction of CPU time, we propose an effective preconditioning technique suitable for the hybrid method. Some numerical results that demonstrate the effectiveness of these approaches are also presented. (C) 2006 American Institute of Physics.