A novel domain decomposition method for the time domain finite element simulation of electromagnetic problems

In this paper, a novel dual-field time-domain finite-element domain-decomposition method is proposed for the efficient simulation of electromagnetic phenomena. The method divides the computation domain into several non-overlapping subdomains and computes of both the electric and magnetic fields in each subdomain by solving second-order vector wave equations. A leapfrog-like scheme is employed in the time marching to update the electric and magnetic fields alternatingly. All the subdomain problems can be solved independently and the communications between adjacent subdomains are minimum. Thus the method is highly suitable for parallel computations. The proposed domain decomposition method is most useful in the numerical simulation of large-scale electromagnetic problems, such as large finite arrays. Numerical stability and accuracy of the method are studied and two radiation examples are presented to demonstrate the accuracy and efficiency of the method