Conformal Time-Domain Methods for Electromagnetic Simulations: From Tetrahedral Mesh to Meshless Discretisation

Christophe Fumeaux

University of Adelaide, Australia

(This talk is co-hosted with the IEEE Toronto Chapter)

Abstract:

Numerical methods applied in Cartesian grids have become workhorses for general purpose time-domain electromagnetic simulations because of their simplicity, efficiency and scalability. Implementations often consider specific treatments for curved and slanted boundaries, as well as sub-cell models and sub-gridding schemes to increase their efficiency in solving multi-scale problems. As alternative to methods in Cartesian grids, methods based on unstructured discretisations, such as tetrahedral meshes, have never truly become mainstream techniques despite their remarkable capabilities for accurate multi-scale and conformal modelling.

This presentation will firstly review some developments of a particular conformal time-domain method applied in tetrahedral meshes, namely the Finite-Volume Time-Domain method. It will then illustrate the potential of the approach for multi-scale problems through selected examples. One of these examples is the full-scale numerical modelling of a 31-antenna array of a real microwave imaging system for breast cancer detection.

The second part of the paper points out to a novel class of numerical methods for electromagnetics, the so-called meshless methods. Meshless methods are amenable to time-domain implementation on clouds of points, and their spatial discretization does not require an explicit mesh definition. The concept opens new perspectives towards future applications involving multi-scale multi-physics problems.

Biography:

Christophe Fumeaux received the Dipl. Phys. and Ph.D. degrees in physics from the ETH Zurich, Switzerland, in 1992 and 1997, respectively. From1998 to 2000, he was a Postdoctoral Researcher with the School of Optics, University of Central Florida, Orlando. In 2000, he joined the Swiss Federal Office of Metrology, Bern, Switzerland, as a Scientific Staff Member. From 2001 to 2008, he was a Research Associate and Group Leader with the Laboratory for Electromagnetic Fields and Microwave Electronics (IFH), ETH, Zurich, Switzerland. During the Fall of 2005, he was a Visiting Scientist at the University Blaise Pascal, Clermont-Ferrand, France. In 2008, he joined the School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at the University of Adelaide, Australia, as an Associate Professor. Since 2011, he is a Future Fellow of the Australian Research Council. His current main research interest concerns computational electromagnetics, antenna engineering, THz technology and the application of RF design principles to optical micro/nano-structures. He has published more than 150 technical papers in peer-reviewed journals and conferences, in both RF and optical areas. Dr. Fumeaux is an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Microwave Theory and Techniques. He was the chairman of the IEEE Swiss Joint Chapter on MTT/AP/EMC from 2006 to 2008. Since 2010, he has been the chairman of the IEEE South Australia AP/MTT Chapter. He was the recipient of the ETH Silver Medal of Excellence for his doctoral dissertation. He was the recipient of the 2004 Outstanding Paper Award of the Applied Computational Electromagnetics Society (ACES).