The stability of numerical approximations of the time domain current induced on thin wire and strip antennas (Q2387320)

Time dependent scattering of electromagnetic waves by thin wire and strip structures has a major role in evaluating the vulnerability of radar systems to transient pulses. This electromagnetic scattering problem involves solving one or more retarded potential integral equations (RPIEs). The difficulty of this problem lies in its computationally intensive approximation schemes that are rather frequently found to generate numerical instabilities. Although it is well known that rigorous convergence results for full finite element schemes are available in the literature for some of the RPIE problems, a fat lot is known about collocation approximations. The study described in this article attempts to produce a stable collocation scheme for the time domain exact kernel thin wire problem. The authors present the derivation of the midline collocated and transversely averaged strip RPIEs, and then attempt to show their relations to the thin wire exact kernel RPIE. They Fourier analyze the temporal stability of spatially exact piecewise constant and linear in time approximations of these three RPIEs. They prove that all three are stable when piecewise constant in time approximation is used, but only the transversely averaged strip approximation is stable with piecewise linear time approximation. In addition, they presented some numerical results for practical schemes that are piecewise constant or linear in time and space, and showed that these are in close agreement with the predictions of the Fourier analysis.