The increasing accessibility to open software for electromagnetic field simulation has allowed the use of these programs as teaching tools. Also, the recent technical developments in the simulation technology have contributed to the ease-of-use of these programs. A problem of energy conversion has been chosen to illustrate the use of the field simulator FEMM on the investigation of the behavior of a physical system. The study examines the effects of the movement of a solid dielectric slab between the electrodes of a flat parallel plate capacitor. A sequence of static problems permits to assess how the variation of the overlapping area between the dielectric slab and the conductive plates affects the various parameters of the system. Numerical calculations for the density of electric flux and force of the electrostatic field are compared with analytical predictions.
electric fields; capacitance; engineering education; force; finite element methods
