A Structured Mesh Generation Based on Improved Ray-Tracing Method for Finite Difference Time Domain Simulation

Abstract

A structured mesh generation method based on an improved ray-tracing technique is proposed for finite time difference domain (FDTD) simulation in this paper. This method converts the triangular faces provided by the STL file into the structured mesh required by the FDTD method. The size of the generated structured mesh is determined by the size of the triangular element, so it is non-uniform and can adapt to the shape of the target. In addition, this method proposes an improved ray-tracing technique to avoid the singularities of the object, so it has much better accuracy than the conventional method. Two representative electromagnetic objects, an Su-30 aircraft and a complex bow-tie antenna, representing a typical electrically large model and fine structure, respectively, are used to validate the accuracy of the mesh generation method. The results show that the presented method has high accuracy, regardless of whether it is used for large targets or fine structures such as a small hole, strip, thin layer, etc.