Comparison of different methods in computing electrostatic fields

The paper aims at comparing two different methods for solving electrostatic field problems. These are: Finite element method and Finite difference method. The comparison of these two methods is performed on a practical design of an electric component and is based on: - mathematical model schematization, starting from the physical model. - automatic description of the mathematical model to the computer - computation times and memory requirements - computation precision in the solution of the example. These two methods have been implemented as different subroutines in the same main program, so that only the bulk of their computing methods is compared and the comparison does not depend on the computer and the programming language. The results show a general equivalence of the two methods, with some advantages to the Finite differences with respect to computation time and Finite elements with respect to precision.