Surface–Volume–Surface EFIE Formulation for Fast Direct Solution of Scattering Problems on General 3-D Composite Metal–Dielectric Objects

Abstract

A new formulation of the surface–volume–surface electric field integral equation (SVS-EFIE) combined with the regular EFIE is introduced for the electromagnetic analysis of the 3-D general composite structures of impenetrable metal and penetrable homogeneous dielectric objects. The proposed method introduces independent surface electric current densities on the boundary of each region which brings the benefit of the independent discretization of the regions according to their respective material properties and straightforward handling of the material junctions. This makes the algorithm more efficient and flexible for analysis of multiscale and large-scale composite structures in comparison with the traditional Poggio–Miller–Chang–Harrington–Wu–Tsai (PMCHWT) integral equation combined with the EFIE. The method of moment (MoM) solution of the new formulation is accelerated by the hierarchical ( $\mathcal H$ )-matrix framework. The numerical results are given to validate the new formulation. Also, the $\mathcal H$ -matrix acceleration of MoM solution of the new combined EFIE and SVS-EFIE formulation is shown to produce accurate results using only the small fraction of memory and total CPU time needed by conventional MoM.