STEAM: A Hierarchical Co-Simulation Framework for Superconducting Accelerator Magnet Circuits

TL;DR

This paper introduces STEAM, a hierarchical co-simulation framework that models superconducting accelerator magnet circuits by integrating electro-thermo-dynamic interactions, ensuring consistent and efficient simulations of complex systems.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel co-simulation framework with a hierarchical approach and waveform relaxation, enabling integrated and consistent simulation of superconducting magnet circuits.

Findings

Successfully co-simulated a quench scenario for LHC's inner triplet circuit.

Demonstrated modularity and flexibility in integrating various models.

Achieved consistent results through convergence of the coupling algorithm.

Abstract

Simulating the transient effects occurring in superconducting accelerator magnet circuits requires including the mutual electro-thermo-dynamic interaction among the circuit elements, such as power converters, magnets, and protection systems. Nevertheless, the numerical analysis is traditionally done separately for each element in the circuit, leading to possible non-consistent results. We present STEAM, a hierarchical co-simulation framework featuring the waveform relaxation method. The framework simulates a complex system as a composition of simpler, independent models that exchange information. The convergence of the coupling algorithm ensures the consistency of the solution. The modularity of the framework allows integrating models developed with both proprietary and in-house tools. The framework implements a user-customizable hierarchical algorithm to schedule how models participate to the co-simulation, for the purpose of using computational resources efficiently. As a case study, a quench scenario is co-simulated for the inner triplet circuit for the High Luminosity upgrade of the LHC at CERN.