Analysis of three-dimensional electromagnetic fields using edge elements (Q1316047)

The authors describe the three-dimensional magnetostatic and eddy current problems in terms of two-component vector potentials using edge elements. The features of these elements are related to the possibility of representing vector fields whose tangential components are constrained to be everywhere continuous, while allowing for discontinuities of the normal component across adjacent elements. In two problems the error is concentrated in constitutive equations. For this it is necessary to enforce the canonical field equations to be exact. The local and global ``constitutive errors'' can be reduced by a mesh refinement. The definition of this error seems, in fact, to be a powerful mean to estimate the quality of numerical solutions and to detect the errors in the input data.