Speed Up Your Design Workflow Using QuickFieldQuickField is a finite-element analysis (FEA) package focused on electromagnetic, thermal, and electrical simulations. It’s lightweight, fast to learn, and well-suited for engineers who need quick answers during iterative design cycles. This article explains practical strategies to use QuickField to accelerate your design workflow while maintaining accuracy, from initial setup to validation and automation.
Why QuickField for faster design cycles
QuickField’s strengths for rapid design iteration:
- Intuitive GUI that reduces model setup time compared with larger multiphysics suites.
- Focused feature set (electromagnetic, thermal, electrostatic, DC conduction) that avoids the overhead of unrelated modules.
- Fast solvers for many 2D/axi-symmetric problems, letting you test concepts quickly.
- Lightweight file sizes and low system requirements, enabling simulations on modest hardware.
These characteristics make QuickField particularly effective for early-stage concept exploration, sensitivity checks, and design trade-off studies.
Plan your simulation workflow
A clear workflow prevents wasted time. Use these stages:
- Define the design question
- Specify what you need (e.g., field distribution, flux linkage, temperature rise, force).
- Set acceptable accuracy and turnaround time targets.
- Choose the right model dimensionality
- Start with 2D cross-sections or axisymmetric models whenever applicable. 2D models run far faster than full 3D while often giving sufficient insight.
- Create a minimal geometry
- Simplify parts that don’t affect the field. Remove tiny features, fillets, and details that force dense meshing.
- Select boundary conditions and material models carefully
- Use approximations where justified (e.g., symmetry planes, infinite boundaries).
- Iterate progressively
- Begin with coarse mesh and relaxed tolerances for quick answers, then refine only when design decisions depend on improved accuracy.
Geometry and meshing tips to save time
- Use symmetry: mirror only the smallest necessary segment; symmetry reduces computation roughly proportionally to the fraction modeled.
- Replace small curved features with straight segments when they don’t affect results.
- Use built-in primitives and coordinate transforms (axisymmetric) to avoid modeling full 3D parts.
- Control mesh density regionally: refine only near high-gradient regions (air gaps, edges of conductors) and keep it coarse elsewhere.
- Reuse meshes between similar designs when possible; QuickField allows saving and importing mesh settings.
Example approach:
- First run: coarse mesh, relative tolerance 1e-2, quick convergence method.
- Second run (if needed): refine mesh in critical regions, tolerance 1e-3.
- Final verification: very fine mesh, tolerance 1e-4 for final numbers.
Solver settings and convergence: balance speed vs accuracy
- Use iterative solvers for large sparse problems; they often converge faster than direct solvers and use less memory.
- Adjust tolerances based on result sensitivity. For conceptual checks, looser tolerances save time.
- Monitor residuals and solution change rather than absolute time; stop when further changes don’t affect decision-making metrics.
- Take advantage of multi-step solves: use a coarse solution as an initial guess for a refined run.
Reuse, parametrize, and automate
- Parametric studies: define geometry and material parameters and sweep them to explore design space. This is far faster than manually editing and re-running models.
- Save templates for recurring problem types (e.g., solenoid, transformer cross-section, PCB trace heating). Templates reduce setup to a few parameter changes.
- Batch runs: create scripts or use QuickField’s built-in batch features (if available) to run multiple cases overnight.
- Combine QuickField with Excel or Python to read/write parameters and post-process results automatically.
Practical example:
- Create a parametric model for coil turns, conductor width, and gap. Run a 20-point sweep overnight to identify a Pareto front for weight vs efficiency.
Post-processing efficiently
- Extract only metrics you need (force, inductance, losses, peak field) rather than saving full-field snapshots for every run.
- Use probes at strategic points and lines to track key values across iterations.
- Automate plots of these values to quickly visualize trends across parameter sweeps.
- Save common result plots as templates to avoid recreating them.
Validation and error estimation without full-cost runs
- Use mesh convergence studies on a representative case, not on every variant. Identify the mesh level where results change negligibly and reuse for similar designs.
- Compare 2D/axisymmetric results with a single 3D validation run for critical designs.
- Use analytical approximations where available (e.g., simple coil inductance formulas) to sanity-check simulations quickly.
Practical examples (use cases)
- Transformer core design
- Model a 2D cross-section with symmetry, approximate winding as current sheets for early iterations, and refine to explicit conductors only for final validation.
- Solenoid valve coil
- Begin axisymmetric model to get force and inductance quickly; use coarse mesh for initial design and refine the gap region later.
- PCB trace heating
- Use a coupled thermal-electrical approach but model only critical trace segments; employ thermal boundary simplifications to speed runs.
Hardware and environment tips
- Use SSDs and sufficient RAM to minimize I/O and swapping during large solves.
- Close unnecessary applications to free memory.
- If available, use a workstation with more CPU cores and higher single-thread performance—QuickField’s solvers often benefit from both.
Common time-wasting mistakes and how to avoid them
- Modeling unnecessary detail — simplify geometry first.
- Using uniform fine mesh everywhere — apply local refinement.
- Repeating manual changes instead of parametrizing — create templates and parameter sweeps.
- Ignoring symmetry — exploit it to reduce model size.
Checklist to speed up each project
- Define a clear question and acceptable accuracy.
- Start 2D/axisymmetric where possible.
- Simplify geometry and apply symmetry.
- Use coarse meshes/tolerances initially.
- Parametrize and automate sweeps.
- Extract only necessary results.
- Validate with targeted finer runs.
QuickField can greatly accelerate design cycles when used with a deliberate workflow: start simple, parameterize, and refine only where necessary. These practices reduce iteration time and let you explore more design options in the same schedule, turning simulation from a bottleneck into a design enabler.
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