Comparison study of the PSTD and FDTD methods for scattering analysis

Abstract

This paper makes a comparison study by using both the pseudospectral time-domain (PSTD) and finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) methods for a two-dimensional (2-D) scattering analysis. The time-domain incident plane-wave pulse used in the PSTD technique is herewith simulated with an initial-condition excitation technique to eliminate the unwanted Gibbs phenomenon. The pure scattered-field formulation is utilized to surmount the difficulty of generation of the incident field, and a PSTD near-to-far-zone field transform is developed for the analysis of the scattering width (SW) of targets. It is found that the PSTD computed results agree well with those derived from the FDTD method, while the PSTD requires much less computational space and CPU time. © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Microwave Opt Technol Lett 25: 220–226, 2000.