Towards analysis-aware geometry defeaturing for inception voltage predictions

Abstract

Geometry simplification (or 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 at all. However, the errors that this practice introduces in the predicted breakdown or inception voltages are currently neglected. This work presents a goal-oriented 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 allows us to quantify 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 Weder and Buffa (2025) 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. This study is a first step towards the application of analysis-aware defeaturing to an industrial application, mainly inception voltage predictions. While it operates under quite restrictive assumptions, it also establishes a framework that can be extended to more complex configurations, and which also has potential for application to other breakdown voltage prediction models and to other types of simulations.