Interactive pre- and post-processing tools for finite-difference time-domain codes

A new finite-difference-time-domain (FDTD) code TSAR is currently being used on a wide range of electromagnetic scattering, coupling, and propagation problems. Some of the geometries of interest are large and quite detailed, requiring meshes with more than a million cells. In addition, an FDTD code is often run for thousands of time steps, producing an enormous quantity of output data. To efficiently deal with these large problems, a set of pre- and postprocessing tools to be used in conjunction with the TSAR FDTD code has been developed. This set of utilities consists of a solid-model-based mesh generator, a mesh verifier, and a color/surface plotter. These tools all run on graphics workstations and, due to their highly interactive nature, are quite easy to use. For added convenience, some of the workstations are connected to a videotape system. With this arrangement, users can record complex time-varying results in a convenient and portable format.<>