Thermal thin shell approximation towards finite element quench simulation

Abstract Superconducting electromagnets commonly exhibit thin layers with high aspect ratio such as insulation layers or turn-to-turn contacts. A finite element (FE) analysis of these devices can lead to unfavorable meshes in these thin layers, either because of a high number of degrees of freedom or mesh elements of poor quality which decrease the accuracy of the simulation results. To mitigate these issues when conducting a thermal FE analysis solving the heat equation, this work proposes to collapse thin volume layers into surfaces by using a thermal thin shell approximation (TSA). The proposed method uses one-dimensional Lagrange elements across the thickness of the thin layer and can handle a variety of interface conditions, multi-layered structures, heat sources, nonlinear material behavior or coupling to physics other than heat transfer. The efficiency of the proposed approximation is highlighted by comparison with a reference model with a conventionally meshed insulation for a model problem exhibiting a brick wall structure where a stationary heat equation is solved. The formulation is then verified against reference models with meshed insulation solving a transient heat equation for an insulated high-temperature superconductor pancake coil exhibiting a local defect which causes a thermal runaway. The benefit of using the model with the TSA is studied by analyzing pancake coils with different ratios of the insulation layer to the coated conductor thickness. It is shown that the smaller the ratio, the shorter the solution time and the lower the number of unknowns of the thin shell model when compared to the conventionally meshed insulation in order to reach the same numerical accuracy. The method is implemented in an open-source FE framework and a reference implementation for a simple model problem is shared alongside this paper.