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Current Trends in Computational Electromagnetics

Jean-Claude Kedzia, ESI Group

Introduction

nitiated in the eighties from a Defense technology, PAM-CEM Solutions were gradually upgraded in order to manage all types of EMC problems (Electromagnetic Compatibility), encountered in various application fields such as Ground Transportation (Automotive and Railways), Electronics, Aeronautics and Defense. Within this framework, several European and Special Projects were performed in order to adapt such solutions to industrial needs and requirements defined by partners such as BMW A.G., RENAULT, or FIAT, Robert Bosch GmbH or SIEMENS. Those AutoEMC and EMC Safe Design projects are fully discussed in References [1] and [2]. In the meantime, several industrial partnerships were initiated in various application fields: Railway EMC with ALSTOM Transport S.A. [3], Automotive EMS with RENAULT in France, HYUNDAI Motor Corporation in Korea [4], General Motors in the US, or MITSUBISHI Electric Corporation in Japan [5], Antenna Design with TOYOTA Motors, TOYOTA Central Laboratory or HONDA in Japan. This article deals with two current projects ESI Group is involved with, characterized by a continuous increase in the size and complexity of those models being considered. In the first case, large scale industrial applications are considered within the industrial deployment of the PAMCEM Solutions currently performed by RENAULT. The AMELET project also discussed in this article is gathering companies such as ONERA, RENAULT, PSA Peugeot Citron, E.A.D.S., ALSTOM Transport, and ESI Group, among others, and is proposing a unified EMC modeling environment for Transportation. Other ESI Group developments for the French Department of Defense, focusing the vulnerability of electronic systems and components or naval EMC, are also discussed.

Figure 1: Measurements on the LAGUNA II Vehicle (SSR pulse simulator in GRAMAT)

Industrial Deployment of the PAM- CEM Solutions

The main objective of the Joint study (performed in 2001 by ESI France engineers in close relationship with RENAULT) was to demonstrate the ability of Numerical EMC to be integrated in the development cycle of industrial automotive vehicles. With this aim in view, the analysis described was carried out as a blind test in fully realistic conditions, i.e. the same as EMC experts from

RENAULT will have to cope with. Within the framework of the development cycles of new automotive vehicles, two time slots are directly connected to EMC issues, dealing on one hand with the optimal location of the cable harness inside the car body when specified and, on the other hand, with the detailed specifications of the harness itself (number of wires and related length, splices location, etc.). Since international EMC regulations are now fully applicable to the automotive industry, all commercial vehicles and their internal electronic equipment have to resist external parasitic electromagnetic aggressions without major problems or malfunctions. This typical situation is known as Electromagnetic Susceptibility (EMS) or Immunity. For one given vehicle, this applies whatever the car body (sedan, convertible or station wagon) and whatever on-board electronic equipment. Due to the number of variants thus obtained, such diversity makes the EMC validation stage very difficult, even critical when considering the availability of the related prototypes, in the right configuration and at the right time in the development cycle. When selecting such prototypes, the choice is mainly based on the EMC experts know-how, and important safety margins are usually taken for both Immunity and Emission. This applies whatever the measurements being performed, before (stand alone testing) or after the equipment integration in its operating environment (on-board vehicles). Despite the extra costs which are surely incurred due to such safety margins, defining some definite limits ensuring EMC compliance is the ultimate goal. The objective of numerical simulation is not only to allow EMC experts to improve their understanding of complex electromagnetic phenomena, Page 23

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but also to reduce the safety margins mentioned before. The continuous decrease of the development cycle makes EMC experts consider potential advantages arising from numerical simulation and intend to integrate such tools in the design process. But, first of all, those simulation tools have to demonstrate their ability to meet the expected predictivity, accuracy, userfriendliness, and ease of use criteria for an industrial deployment.
Figure 2: PAM-CEM assembling of the LAGUNA II body-in-white.

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Even if closely bound one to the other, those two slots do not appear at the same time in the development cycle: the first one starts immediately after the complete CAD model is available, and lasts about five weeks or so, while the second one appears much later and lasts for two months due to the complexity of electronic on-board equipment. It should be kept in mind that the previous deadlines are mentioned for the EMC department in charge of the related specifications. When considering Numerical EMC and its integration in such industrial processes, the total duration of the window should include not only the data gathering, the modeling, the electromagnetic computations, and the exploitation of such results, but also and mainly the related expertise, some parametric analysis to be applied to those configurations identified as critical, and the final decision. Therefore, the deadline for Numerical EMC is not about five weeks as mentioned previously, which corresponds to the total deadline, but should be about one single week. The challenge for the EMC team at ESI France was thus to apply the PAM-CEM Solutions to a complete LAGUNA II vehicle (body-in-white and equipped pre-series prototype) in order to analyze in a very limited time (one week) its electromagnetic behavior when aggressed by an external wave. In the meantime, some experimental measurements were performed with the real vehicles, using an electromagnetic pulse simulator (located in GRAMAT, France), the final comparison was made by RENAULT engineers in order to evaluate the predictivity of such simulation tools, the efficiency of the process proposed by ESI Group and the related accuracy. Following standard EMC regulations for Immunity, this analysis was performed in a frequency range, starting from 1 MHz and running up to 1 GHz. During this study, in addition to the challenge mentioned Page 24

above, all relevant features of the operating process were carefully analyzed in order to identify key features for a successful further industrial deployment. This applied to data input and management for both the car geometry and the internal cabled structure (with equipment), computer resources for all stages of the numerical process, including full modeling with electromagnetic specifications, mesh generation, and electromagnetic calculations with post-processing and exploitation, as well as data transfer from 3D Maxwell software tools (electromagnetic fields evaluated in time the domain) to specialized ones (Cable Networks tools operating in the frequency domain).

Preliminar y Analysis of the Industrial Process

Prior to the Joint Study itself, a preliminary stage was dedicated to the analysis of the industrial process and to the input CAD data to be managed for the full electromagnetic calculation process. It so happened that for the vehicle being considered (LAGUNA II), two different types of CAD systems were used, namely CATIA V4 and EUCLID. For this reason, dealing with native CAD data would have been much too time consuming and CEM3D based on a classical Finite Difference Time Domain technique (sugar cube mesh) appeared to be the best suited solution for the very short deadlines. PAM-CEM requires the geometry to be fully defined in one homogeneous and convenient way, with well defined and connected surfaces. Such a PAM-CEM process is currently being evaluated in detail, but within the framework of the Joint Study, CEM3D appeared as the best candidate so far. In addition, in order to avoid the management of some CAD data coming from two different Systems, a common STL data exchange was selected for the PRE-CEM import stage.

Geometrical Modeling
From such preliminary considerations (management of STL files), two models were created within the PRECEM pre-processing module. All parts of the two vehicles were thus gathered in order to manage complete models, instead of the former sub-directory organization as used for the industrial process. Two models were
Figure 3: Electromagnetic field distribution with an external aggression (EMS).

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successively analyzed: the LAGUNA II body-in-white and the related pre-series vehicle. About 60 files were gathered for the pre-series (2 million surfaces, 915 Megabytes of STL data), and the size of the final model exceeded 350 Megabytes. On the same CAD input basis, additional data relating to the internal wiring was specified and the meshing stage could be entered. Inside the vehicles, the location of the harness was specified using IGES files. When applying the EMS coupling procedure, there is no need to deal with a complete description of the cable networks: only the central line is managed to calculate tangential electric field components along this path, to be used in a second step as exciting conditions for the CRIPTE software. Such information is directly used in order to characterize the related line parameters according to their height above the reference structure (meshed geometry). The interface between PAM-CEM and CRIPTE allows a direct extraction of Transmission Line parameters, given the cable path in the vehicle and the related surface mesh. All geometrical input is directly read and used without any additional operation (fully automatic process). However, at the time of this Joint Study, the operator still had to check whether this central line where electric fields are output, is not intercepting the 3D sugar cube mesh. Cable networks were created using the PRECEM internal data structure specified on the basis of dedicated information coming from specialized CATIA modules (E3LCable) and describing its characteristic features: electrical schematic, conductivity or cable resistance. The only input to be managed by the operator was the wires location inside the bundle. For technological reasons (twisting, random location), this information remains difficult to specify and simplified models were thus used, even if more sophisticated modeling capabilities are now proposed (see Industrial Deployment Section). Within the framework of this study, all terminal loads were specified as 50 ohms loads, in accordance with those conditions considered for experimental measurements.

Figure 4: Radiated electromagnetic fields (computation versus measurements).

Comparison with Measurements

In order to investigate the effectiveness of the PAM-CEM Solutions, some experimental measurements were conducted by RENAULT with both vehicles (body-in-white and pre-series) using the semi-rhombic simulator (SSR) in GRAMAT generating a plane wave electromagnetic pulse in the [1 MHz - 1 GHz] frequency range. As this experimental facility is operating in open air, and due to the fact that the related radiated power could damage internal electronic equipment, the test area was characterized by a non-perfect plane wave. The related wave impedance exhibited a few discontinuities (21 MHz), as well as some very high values (24 or 160 MHz). In

addition, the exciting signal was falling off beyond 200 MHz, making it hard to exploit efficiently. Such comments should be kept in mind when considering the comparison of simulated results with experimental measurements. Measured results are characterized by some parasitic oscillating behavior in the low frequency range, while undesirable discontinuities can be observed for some discrete values such as 21, 24 or 160 MHz. Due to the pollution and to the signal weakness mentioned here above, those measured results performed in free space exhibited a poor signal-to noise level beyond 200 MHz. Using previous models, some CEM3D calculations were conducted in order to calculate the electromagnetic environment all around the vehicles. For the frequency range starting from 1 MHz and running up to 1 GHz, radiated fields were observed in various locations: between the front seats, at the dashboard level, bonnet, doors. Figure 4 is illustrating the agreement obtained by RENAULT when comparing numerical simulations performed by ESI France as a blind test and experimental measurements. Despite the measurements of the uncertainty mentioned above and the limitations due to the coupling procedure (3D modeling without wired structure), the agreement between simulations and experimental results was quite good for the entire frequency range. This intermediate validation stage dealing with radiated fields only was extended to Common-Mode currents and voltage values on terminal loads of the cable networks. Those results were obtained using the coupling procedure described here above. Electromagnetic radiated fields were calculated in the time domain along the wires path and directly transferred to the CRIPTE software through the C3M interface. As in the previous case, a very good agreement was reached for voltage values on terminal 50 ohms loads over the entire frequency range. Page 25

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CEM3D/CRIPTE coupling. Special attention was also Industrial Deployment dedicated to the data input related to fully realistic wired Within the framework of this Joint Study performed by ESI structures, which is absolutely required when considering France in close partnership with the RENAULT Company, industrial integration. Other relevant topics are being the ability of Numerical EMC to be deployed at an evaluated, such as the improvement of the current industrial scale was demonstrated in fully realistic solution by means of Finite Element techniques (PAMoperating conditions. Dealing with complete vehicles CEM), the effect of relevant electromagnetic contributors (LAGUNA II) integrating realistic wiring, the EMS (slots, small apertures), and other application fields such (Electromagnetic Susceptibility) analysis described in this as Antenna Design. article was performed in a wide frequency range, starting from 1 MHz and running up to 1 GHz, and the related computed results were successfully compared with The AMELET Project experimental measurements, even if the analysis was With the aim of capitalizing the overall knowledge from all conducted as a blind test. The agreement was quite good partners, the AMELET project is proposing an integrated for radiated fields and induced simulation platform currents, as well as voltages at the specialized in the EMC level of terminal calculators. This (ElectroMagnetic Joint Study was performed with the Compatibility) analysis CEM3D and CRIPTE tools, integrated of industrial problems in the PAM-CEM Solutions and faced in the coupled one with the other following transportation the procedure validated during the industry. Based on a AutoEMC European Project [1]. With unified reference data the aim of deploying such solutions base, this platform will at an industrial scale, all relevant offer a dedicated aspects were successively examined: environment allowing data input and management (vehicle the user to analyze geometry and internal wiring), efficiently and in a computer resources, user-friendliness highly flexible way, all and ease of use, deadline to access those typical EMC reliable and exploitable results, situations, dealing Figure 5: Typical application case of the AMELET Project integration in the industrial process. either with the (Automotive EMS). ElectroMagnetic In order to allow decision makers to Susceptibility or identify in a very short time and with very tight delays the Immunity of fully equipped vehicle, with the radiation of best compromise among various industrial options, which on-board electronic equipment, as well as Interference is typical of early stage design, the PAM-CEM Solutions issues or even Antenna Design. Typical application cases were adapted in such a way that fast and reliable results are illustrated in Figure 5. Whatever the scenario is, an could be easily reached. Three working days were industrial solution is proposed to investigate the related necessary to manage the first complete vehicle and to electromagnetic phenomena, with the help of dedicated access the related electromagnetic environment, which is software tools integrated in a modular environment. quite in agreement with the original challenge targeting Coordinated by ONERA, this three-year project, supported exploitation of such simulation tools in less than one week. within the PREDIT Programme by the French Department At the end of this Joint Study, and once the demonstration of Research and Space, is gathering industrial end-users was fully secured, a partnership between ESI Group and (ALSTOM Transport, PSA Peugeot Citron, RENAULT), the RENAULT Company was initiated aimed at improving software providers (E.A.D.S., ESI Group, ONERA), EMC such PAM-CEM Solutions in order to fulfill industrial users experts (CERPEM, INRETS), and research institutes requirements. All stages of the numerical procedure were (SUPELEC, ESIGELEC). At this stage of the project (18 thus carefully examined in order to increase their months out of 36), industrial needs in EMC simulation efficiency if possible. This applies to the preliminary were identified by end-users and carefully analysed in assembling stage (leading to the COMPOSER concept order to define some typical application scenarios. All currently developed for crash worthiness), to the required modelling and computing capabilities of the optimization of the meshing stage, of the electromagnetic software tools to be integrated in the platform were calculation and to the data transfer for the investigated in order to check their ability to manage such Page 26 April 2004

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R eferences
[1] F. CANAVERO, J.C. KEDZIA, P . RAVIER and B. SCHOLL, Automotive EMC: Numerical Simulation for Early EMC Design of Cars, Proceedings of the PAM Users Conference in Korea HanPAM 2000, Seoul, Korea, November 2000. [2] J.C. KEDZIA, G. GUGLIELMETTI and S. DICKMANN, Improving EMC Compliance of Electronic Devices through Numerical Simulation, Proceedings of the PAM Users Conference in Japan PUCA 2000, Tokyo, Japan, November 2000. [3] J.C. KEDZIA, Numerical EMC in Railway Transportation: Examples of Realistic Applications, Proceedings of the PAM Users Conference in Korea HanPAM 99, Seoul, Korea, November 1999. [4] B.W. KWAK, J.H. KIM, J.W. YOO, P . MALNOULT and J.C. KEDZIA, EMC/EMI Analysis in a Vehicle with Harness, Proceedings of the PAM Users Conference in Europe EuroPAM 2001, Heidelberg, Germany, October 2001. [5] Y. SHIRAKI, K. SUGAHARA, S. TANABE, K. NAKAMOTO and T. WATANABE, Electromagnetic Field Distribution inside an Automobile Vehicle, Proceeding of the IEEE Symposium on Electromagnetic Compatibility, Boston, MA, USA, August 2003. [6] F. BOCQUET and J.C. KEDZIA, Key Features for the Successful Industrial Deployment of Numerical EMC In Automotive, Proceedings of the PAM Users Conference in Europe EuroPAM 2002, Antibes, France, October 2002.

Figures 6: Typical Aeronautics & Defense application cases of Numerical EMC.

industrial problems. In the meantime, the AMELET reference database was initiated with the aim of defining one common data exchange format for all kinds of information: CAD data, meshes, cabling and antennas, materials, electromagnetic data, statistical approaches or measured values. Once fully specified, the related connecting interfaces of the platform were developed in order to allow all the necessary modules to be plugged-in. Those developments are currently being validated before running those application cases previously identified by industrial end-users.

Other Projects Dealing With Aeronautics & Defence

In addition to the Automotive EMC projects that ESI Group is involved in, similar trends can be noticed in some other fields such as Aeronautics and Defense. In those industrial sectors, the development of computing techniques started a long time ago and many methods were made available: Multiconductor Transmission Lines techniques, Finite-Difference Time-Domain, 2D Boundary or Finite Elements, Method of Moments, Ray tracing or ray bouncing methods, Finite Volumes or 3D Finite Elements, etc. All these methods were extensively and deeply investigated and validated: the key feature that is now identified is relying on large scale application cases for fully realistic models with high values of the operating frequency. The know-how accumulated in others industrial sectors such as Automotive or Railways appears to be very useful when large data files need to be managed with a high level of accuracy. Both aspects are illustrated in Figure 6, with some typical application cases together with the PAM-CEM agreement obtained with various other methods for a generic missile.

Contact
Jean-Claude Kedzia ESI Group E Jean-Claude.Kedzia@esi-group.com

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