POLARIS

POLARIS is a high-performance simulation software for the dielectric design of high-voltage devices. Its Boundary Element Method (BEM) solver accurately models electrodes, dielectric media, and floating potentials and evaluates electric fields throughout the surrounding domain.

Built for problems of all sizes, POLARIS scales seamlessly from laptops to HPC clusters using MPI. Fast Multipole Methods eliminate the need for dense BEM matrices, making large-scale simulations computationally efficient and memory-conscious.

POLARIS works directly with several surface mesh formats and produces VTKHDF results ready for visualization in ParaView. A complementary browser-based graphical interface makes model creation and simulation setup straightforward.

         

Gallery

Here are some simple POLARIS example. We greatfully acknowledge Elliptic Fields for providing some of the examples.

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concentric spheres
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Features

  • Processes GMSH and Nastran BDF surface mesh files
  • Support for 1st and 2nd order triangular and quadrilateral elements
  • Models electrodes, dielectric media, and floating/free potentials
  • Calculates the electric field in the exterior domain
  • Covers a wide range of hardware: Runs on Laptops as well as on HPC clusters
  • POLARIS is based on a Galerkin BEM, and it utilizes Fast Multipole Methods as a compression technique
  • The generated VTKHDF files can be visualized using ParaView
  • The POLARIS preprocessor assists in the generation of the input data
  • POLARIS comes as a Linux command-line tool. For other operating systems, please contact us
  • POLARIS is free for non-commercial use

Limitations

  • The free version is restricted to 16 MPI processes
  • The free version does not use adaptive quadrature schemes (There might be edge cases that result in recognizable local errors)
  • The license expires by Jan 1st, 2027

Download

Latest version

A description on how to import TAILSIT's public GPG key can be found at TAILSIT/gpg. If desired, verify the download via:

  • gpg --verify <polaris-archive>.sha256.asc <polaris-archive>.sha256
  • sha256sum --check <polaris-archive>.sha256

Quick start

After unzipping the archive, the bin folder contains the two executables polaris and polaris.post. Copy these executables either to your $HOME/bin folder or to any other destination that is in your search path.

The share folder contains the license file polaris_license.json. Copy the license file to one of the following locations:

  • /etc/polaris/polaris_license.json (system wide)
  • /opt/polaris/polaris_license.json (system wide)
  • $HOME/.config/polaris/polaris_license.json (user install)
  • $HOME/.polaris/polaris_license.json (user install)
  • /any/location/you/like/polaris_license.json (and point to it via the environment variable POLARIS_LICENSE_FILE)

Run POLARIS simply via

[mpirun -np <nproc>] polaris -i <file.mesh> -s <settings.yaml>

Examples can be found in the archive's example folder. A detailed description about POLARIS can be found in the included README.md.

About polaris

POLARIS is a high-performance simulation software for the dielectric design and analysis of high-voltage devices. It uses the Boundary Element Method (BEM) to accurately model electrostatic problems involving electrodes, dielectric media, and floating or initially unknown potentials.

Designed with scalability in mind, POLARIS uses MPI-based parallelization and runs efficiently across a wide range of hardware—from laptops and engineering workstations to large HPC clusters. A Fast Multipole Method (FMM) provides efficient compression of the boundary-element operator, avoiding the storage and computational cost of dense BEM matrices and enabling the simulation of large-scale models.

POLARIS accepts various surface mesh formats and supports both flat and curved triangular and quadrilateral surface elements. Higher-order discretizations based on L² and H¹ᐟ² finite-element spaces allow the accuracy of the numerical model to be adapted to the requirements of the application.

In addition to solving for surface quantities, POLARIS can evaluate the electric field throughout the exterior domain, providing the information required to analyze field distributions and identify critical regions in high-voltage designs.

Simulation results are written in the modern VTKHDF format and can be opened directly in visualization and post-processing software such as ParaView.

A complementary browser-based POLARIS application provides a graphical interface for creating and configuring simulation models. It simplifies the preparation of POLARIS input files and makes setting up dielectric simulations accessible without manually writing configuration data.

Licensing

The use of this POLARIS version is permitted for non-commercial purposes only. For further information we refer to our General Terms and Conditions.

For commercial licenses of POLARIS, please contact us.

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