Published in IET Microwaves, Antennas & Propagation
Received on 12th November 2008
Revised on 12th January 2009
doi: 10.1049/iet-map.2008.0394
ISSN 1751-8725
Three-dimensional hybrid implicit–explicit
finite-difference time-domain method in
the cylindrical coordinate system
J. Chen
1,2
J. Wang
1,2
C. Tian
1
1
School of Electronic and Information Engineering, Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xi’an 710049, People’s Republic of China
2
Northwest Institute of Nuclear Technology, P.O. Box 69-15, Xi’an 710024, People’s Republic of China
E-mail: chenjuan0306@yahoo.com.cn
Abstract: A novel hybrid implicit–explicit (HIE) finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) method, which is extremely
useful for problems with very fine structures along the
w
-direction in cylindrical coordinate system, is presented.
This method has higher computation efficiency than conventional cylindrical FDTD methods, because the time
step in this method is only determined by the space discretisations in the radial and vertica l directions. The
numerical stability of the proposed HI E –FDTD method is presented analytically. Compared with the cylindrical
alternating-direction implicit (ADI)–FDTD method, this HIE–FDTD method has higher accuracy, especially for
larger time step size. At each time step, the HIE– FDTD method requires the solution of two tridiagonal
matrices and four explicit updates. While maintaining the same size of time step, the central processing unit
(CPU) time for this weakly conditionally stable FDTD method can be reduced to about 3/5ofthatforthe
ADI– FDTD scheme. The numerical performance of the proposed HIE–FDTD over the conventional cylindrical
FDTD method and cylindrical ADI–FDTD method is demonstrated through numerical examples.
1 Introduction
The finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) method [1] has
been proven to be an effective simulation method that
provides accurate predictions of field behaviours for
varieties of electromagnetic interaction problems. However,
as it is based on an explicit finite-difference algorithm, the
Courant–Friedrich–Levy (CFL) condition [2] must be
satisfied when this method is used. For the conventional
cylindrical FDTD method [3–6], the time step Dt has to
satisfy the following CFL condition
Dt Dt
CFL
¼ 1 =
ffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi
(1=Dr)
2
þ (1=D
f
)
2
þ (1(1=Dz)
2
q
(1)
where c is the maximum phase velocity in the media being
modelled and D r, D
f
and Dz are th e smallest spatial
discret isation st eps in the radial, angular and vertical
directions, respectively. Near the r ¼ 0axis,thespace
discret isation step in the angular direction is
D
f
¼ DrD
w
=2, which is often much smaller than Dr
and Dz. D
w
¼ 2
p
=
f
number
,
f
number
is the total number
of spatial discretisation in the angular d irection. Thus,
the cylindrical FDTD method often uses a small time
step size, which makes the method computationally
inefficient.
To remove the CFL constraint on the time step size of the
FDTD method, unconditionally stable methods such as the
alternating-direction implicit (ADI) FDTD [7–9] scheme
have been studied extensively. The ADI–FDTD method
has been extended to the cylindrical coordinate system
successfully [10]. Although the time step size in the ADI–
FDTD simulations is no longer bounded by the CFL
criterion, the method exhibits a splitting error associated
with the square of the time step size [11, 12], which limits
the accuracy of the ADI–FDTD method. Meanwhile, in
the ADI–FDTD scheme, three time steps are used for
defining the field components and two sub-iterations are
1254 IET Microw. Antennas Propag ., 2009, Vol. 3, Iss. 8, pp. 1254– 1261
&
The Institution of Engineering and Technology 2009 doi: 10.1049/iet-map.2008.0394
www.ietdl.org