Electromagnetic–Thermal Co-Simulation of Planar Monopole Antenna Based on HIE-FDTD Method

Abstract

This paper presents an efficient approach to implement electromagnetic-thermal (EM-T) co-simulation of a planar monopole antenna based on hybrid implicit-explicit finite-difference time-domain method (HIE-FDTD-M). First, the EM simulation is carried out by solving Maxwell’s curl equation. Once the EM field reaches steady state, the EM power loss is computed according to the electric conductivity of the material. Finally, the thermal field is simulated by taking the EM power loss as the heat source in the heat transfer equation (HTE). For comparison, HIE-FDTD-M and FDTD-M are adopted respectively in the computation of the EM field. The simulated EM parameters of the planar monopole antenna, including S11 and radiation pattern, are consistent with those obtained by using CST software. The thermal field distribution on the surface of the antenna computed by the proposed method in this paper is approximately similar to that obtained using COMSOL software. However, the EM-T co-simulation of the antenna using HIE-FDTD-M takes only 1/11 of the time required using FDTD-M.