A HIGHER ORDER ANALYSIS OF A CLASS OF INHOMOGENEOUSLY FILLED CONDUCTING WAVEGUIDES

A higher order analysis is applied to solve the problem of a class of inhomogeneously-filled conducting waveguides. This includes an arbitrary but smooth hollow conducting waveguides and waveguides filled with layered inhomogeneous materials. The method employs a set of spline-harmonic basis functions and leads to one-dimensional integrals for system matrix elements. This fact along with the higher order nature of the basis functions provides an accurate method for the analysis of the aforementioned waveguides. The accuracy and the convergence behavior of the method are studied through several numerical examples and the results are compared with the exact solutions and with the results of Ansoft HFSS simulator to establish the validity of the proposed method.