Optimized quadrilateral mesh for higher order method of moment based on triangular mesh decimation

The effectiveness of the proposed algorithm is illustrated on the model of a crossed exponentially tapered slots antenna (XETS). We are comparing mesh, computed gain, required memory and simulation time of the antenna half-model (one symmetry plane is exploited), meshed with and without mesh decimation (Figs. 4 and 5). The mesh decimation was allowed to enlarge average size of mesh elements maximally 2 times. Overlay of the E-plane and H-plane gain patterns are displayed in Fig. 6. As we can see from the diagram, the results match excellently. Number of unknowns, required memory and simulation time are given in Tab. 1. Applied mesh decimation decreased the number of mesh elements used to represent the model significantly. On one hand, larger mesh elements with 2nd order basis functions were more frequently used than the small elements with rooftops. On the other hand, many of the new mesh elements replaced several smaller elements from the original mesh, but were still small enough to adequately use rooftops. The combination of these effects provided about 30% reduction of number of unknowns, which is equivalent to about two times less memory used, and about 2.15 times faster simulation. Simulations were performed with WIPL-D Pro 8.0 on a PC with a 2.66 GHz Intel Core 2 Quad CPU.