Comparison of 3D Adaptive Remeshing Strategies for Finite Element Simulations of Electromagnetic Heating of Gold Nanoparticles

The optical properties of metallic nanoparticles are well known, but the study of their thermal behavior is in its infancy. However the local heating of surrounding medium, induced by illuminated nanostructures, opens the way to new sensors and devices. Consequently the accurate calculation of the electromagnetically induced heating of nanostructures is of interest. The proposed multiphysics problem cannot be directly solved with the classical refinement method of Comsol Multiphysics and a 3D adaptive remeshing process based on an a posteriori error estimator is used. In this paper the efficiency of three remeshing strategies for solving the multiphysics problem is compared. The first strategy uses independent remeshing for each physical quantity to reach a given accuracy. The second strategy only controls the accuracy on temperature. The third strategy uses a linear combination of the two normalized targets (the electric field intensity and the temperature). The analysis of the performance of each strategy is based on the convergence of the remeshing process in terms of number of elements. The efficiency of each strategy is also characterized by the number of computation iterations, the number of elements, the CPU time, and the RAM required to achieve a given target accuracy.