An efficient locally one-dimensional finite-difference time-domain method based on the conformal scheme

An efficient conformal locally one-dimensional finite-difference time-domain (LOD-CFDTD) method is presented for solving two-dimensional (2D) electromagnetic (EM) scattering problems. The formulation for the 2D transverse-electric (TE) case is presented and its stability property and numerical dispersion relationship are theoretically investigated. It is shown that the introduction of irregular grids will not damage the numerical stability. Instead of the staircasing approximation, the conformal scheme is only employed to model the curve boundaries, whereas the standard Yee grids are used for the remaining regions. As the irregular grids account for a very small percentage of the total space grids, the conformal scheme has little effect on the numerical dispersion. Moreover, the proposed method, which requires fewer arithmetic operations than the alternating-direction-implicit (ADI) CFDTD method, leads to a further reduction of the CPU time. With the total-field/scattered-field (TF/SF) boundary and the perfectly matched layer (PML), the radar cross section (RCS) of two 2D structures is calculated. The numerical examples verify the accuracy and efficiency of the proposed method. (paper)