Near-field performance analysis of locally-conformal perfectly matched absorbers via Monte Carlo simulations

Abstract

In the numerical solution of some boundary value problems by the finite element method (FEM), the unbounded domain must be truncated by an artificial absorbing boundary or layer to have a bounded computational domain. The perfectly matched layer (PML) approach is based on the truncation of the computational domain by a reflectionless artificial layer which absorbs outgoing waves regardless of their frequency and angle of incidence. In this paper, we present the near-field numerical performance analysis of our new PML approach, which we call as locally-conformal PML, using Monte Carlo simulations. The locally-conformal PML method is an easily implementable conformal PML implementation, to the problem of mesh truncation in the FEM. The most distinguished feature of the method is its simplicity and flexibility to design conformal PMLs over challenging geometries, especially those with curvature discontinuities, in a straightforward way without using artificial absorbers. The method is based on a special complex coordinate transformation which is ‘locally-defined’ for each point inside the PML region. The method can be implemented in an existing FEM software by just replacing the nodal coordinates inside the PML region by their complex counterparts obtained via complex coordinate transformation. We first introduce the analytical derivation of the locally-conformal PML method for the FEM solution of the two-dimensional scalar Helmholtz equation arising in the mathematical modeling of various steady-state (or, time-harmonic) wave phenomena. Then, we carry out its numerical performance analysis by means of some Monte Carlo simulations which consider both the problem of constructing the two-dimensional Green’s function, and some specific cases of electromagnetic scattering.