Improving Conditioning of Electromagnetic Surface Integral Equations Using Normalized Field Quantities

Abstract

When the surface integral equation method is applied to study electromagnetic scattering by dielectric or composite metallic and dielectric objects, the unknowns, i.e., the electric and magnetic surface current densities, and the elements of the system matrix, are often of the very different scales. As a consequence, the system matrix may have a high (singular value) condition number. An efficient method is presented to balance the unknowns and the integral equations, and the elements of the system matrix, too. The method is based on the use of normalized field quantities and unknowns, and carefully chosen scaling factors. In the case of dielectric and composite objects the condition numbers of the SIE matrices can be reduced with several orders of magnitudes by the developed method. In the case of high contrast objects, or if the frequency is very low, the developed method leads also to a clear improvement on the convergence of iterative solutions