An Unconditionally Stable Conformal LOD-FDTD Method for Curved PEC Objects and its Application to EMC Problems

Abstract

The traditional finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) method is constrained by the Courant–Friedrich–Levy condition and suffers from the notorious staircase error in electromagnetic simulations. This article proposes a 3-D conformal locally one-dimensional FDTD (CLOD-FDTD) method to address the two issues for modeling perfectly electrical conducting (PEC) objects. By considering the partially filled cells, the proposed CLOD-FDTD method can significantly improve the accuracy compared with the traditional locally one-dimensional FDTD (LOD-FDTD) method and the FDTD method. At the same time, the proposed method preserves unconditional stability, which is analyzed and numerically validated using the von Neumann method. Significant gains in central processing unit time are achieved by using large time steps without sacrificing accuracy. Two numerical examples, including a PEC cylinder and a missile, are used to verify its accuracy and efficiency with different meshes and time steps. It can be found from these examples that the CLOD-FDTD method shows better accuracy and can improve the efficiency compared with those of the traditional FDTD method and the traditional LOD-FDTD method.