Cosimulation of Electromagnetics-Circuit Systems Exploiting DGTD and MNA

Abstract

A hybrid electromagnetics (EM)-circuit simulator exploiting the discontinuous Galerkin time domain (DGTD) method and the modified nodal analysis (MNA) algorithm is developed for analyzing hybrid distributive and nonlinear multiport lumped circuit systems. The computational domain is split into two subsystems. One is the EM subsystem that is analyzed by DGTD, while the other is the circuit subsystem that is solved by the MNA method. The coupling between the EM and circuit subsystems is enforced at the lumped port where related field and circuit unknowns are coupled via the use of numerical flux, port voltages, and current sources. Since the spatial operations of DGTD are localized, thanks to the use of numerical flux, coupling matrices between EM and circuit subsystems are small and are directly inverted. To handle nonlinear devices within the circuit subsystem, the standard Newton-Raphson method is applied to the nonlinear coupling matrix system. In addition, a local time-stepping scheme is applied to improve the efficiency of the hybrid solver. Numerical examples including single and multiport linear/nonlinear circuit networks are presented to validate the proposed solver.