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 examples. We gratefully acknowledge Elliptic Fields for providing some of the examples.

sphereBicone
concentric spheres
bushing

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 is available for Linux and Windows 11. Linux builds support MPI and shared-memory parallelization; the Windows version supports shared-memory parallelization. For other operating systems, please contact us
  • POLARIS is free for non-commercial use

Download

Latest version

The Linux builds are based on AlmaLinux 8.10 (Cerulean Leopard), but any Linux system with glibc ≥ 2.28 should work.

For detailed information about the underlying MPI implementation please look into manifest/release.json.

The Linux builds can be verified by using our public GPG key (Go to https://github.com/TAILSIT/gpg for further information). Verification can then be done via:

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

Documentation

A detailed description about POLARIS can be found in the included README.md. In addition, the contents of README.md are also available via the online documentation.

Non-Commercial License

In order to obtain a valid license file for non-commercial purposes, please fill out this license form. This license will be restricted to 16 MPI processes and will be valid for 180 days. Once the license has been received, copy polaris_license.json to the location /any/location/you/like/polaris_license.json and point to it with the environment variable POLARIS_LICENSE_FILE. For alternative ways, see the documentation. For commercial licenses of POLARIS, please contact us.

Quick start

After unzipping the archive (Linux) or installing (Windows), the bin folder contains the two executables polaris and polaris.post.

Run POLARIS simply via

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

Examples can be found in the archive's share/examples folder. Each example is accompanied with a documentation and instructions of how the settings.yaml file can be obtained using the preprocessor.

References

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.

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