A New Approach on Driven Periodic Structure Modeling and Lattice Termination for Finite-Difference Time-Domain

Dongying Li

The Edward S. Rogers Sr. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (Electromagnetics)

Abstract:

The study of periodic structures is motivated by the many applications  they can support, either as frequency selective surfaces, photonic and electromagnetic band-gap crystals, or artificial dielectrics. The interest in the latter area has been recently enhanced by the extensive research activity aimed at synthesizing media with unusual macroscopic properties. Along with this activity, numerical tools that can capture unconventional wave effects observed in metamaterial geometries and illuminate the underlying physics have  been proposed.  To this end, time-domain techniques, such as the Finite-Difference Time-Domain (FDTD) are particularly useful, because they effectively model the rich transients involved with the evolution of these effects.  We propose a method which couples the well-known sine-cosine method with the array-scanning technique. The technique enables the incorporation of non-periodic sources, and furthurmore, non-periodic metallic objects such as microstrip lines and antennas, with periodic structures, thus enabling the fast characterization of driven periodic structures in the time-domain via a small number of low cost simulations. The method can be further extended to offer a uniform and efficient way for FDTD mesh truncation with accuracy levels comparable to absorbers.

Biography:

Dongying Li received his B. Sc. degree in electrical engineering from Shanghai Jiao Tong University, in 2004, and his M. A. Sc degree in electrical engineering from McMaster University, in 2006. The research towards his Master degree involved sensitivity analysis and engineering optimization of microwave structures. He is currently working toward the Ph. D. Degree in the area of computational electromagnetics in University of Toronto, under the supervision of Prof. Costas Sarris. His research emphasizes in time-domain periodic 
structure modeling for metamaterial applications.