A 3-D Hybrid Implicit Explicit Single-Field Finite-Difference Time-Domain Method

Abstract

This paper presents a new 3-D hybrid implicit explicit (HIE) finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) method with a stability criterion relaxed from the discretization space steps in one direction. The proposed method is particularly useful and efficient for electromagnetic (EM) simulation of structures having fine details in one Cartesian direction such as thin shields and thin slots on a metallic enclosure whose EM analysis are popular and important in electromagnetic compatibility. In this algorithm, unlike common FDTD methods in which both electric and magnetic fields are updated, only the electric field needs to be updated during the time-marching process of the algorithm; hence, it is called as a “single-field” FDTD method. This could be achieved by applying the Crank-Nicolson (CN) scheme only to the electric field, while in earlier HIE-FDTD (and also unconditionally stable FDTD) methods, the CN scheme is applied to both electric and magnetic fields. The proposed algorithm consists of two implicit and three explicit updating equations that can be solved simultaneously (in parallel) by applying multithreading. Thanks to few and simple updating equations of the proposed algorithm, it is computationally more efficient than other HIE-FDTD methods in terms of runtime. The high computational efficiency and accuracy of the proposed method are demonstrated by producing several numerical examples and providing comparison to the results obtained using methods available in the literature.