A Robust Method to Accurately Treat Arbitrarily Curved 3-D Thin Conductive Sheets in FDTD

Stefan Schild, Nicolas Chavannes, and Niels Kuster, IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation, vol. 55, no. 12, pp. 3587–3594, December 2007

This paper proposes a novel method to treat thin conductive (TC) sheets of arbitrary three-dimensional (3-D) shape and curvature with the electromagnetic (EM) finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) algorithm without the need to resolve the sheet thickness spatially. It shows that the physical properties of TC sheets enable one to do so without introducing additional field components to the conventional Yee scheme. Due to this noninvasive approach, in addition to the preserved stability of the FDTD algorithm, the method can be directly applied to any existing FDTD kernel, such as parallelized or hardware accelerated versions. The method has been developed within the framework of a professional EM FDTD software package and tested on real-world problems.

DOWNLOAD ARTICLE