EFFICIENT TIME-DOMAIN ANALYSIS OF WAVEGUIDE DISCONTINUITIES USING HIGHER ORDER FEM IN FREQUENCY DOMAIN

A computational technique is presented for efficient and accurate time-domain analysis of multiport waveguide structures with arbitrary metallic and dielectric discontinuities using a higher order finite element method (FEM) in the frequency domain. It is demonstrated that with a highly efficient and appropriately designed frequency-domain FEM solver, it is possible to obtain extremely fast and accurate time-domain solutions of microwave passive structures performing computations in the frequency domain along with the discrete Fourier transform (DFT) and its inverse (IDFT). The technique is a higher order large domain Galerkin-type FEM for 3-D analysis of waveguide structures with discontinuities implementing curl-conforming hierarchical polynomial vector basis functions in conjunction with Lagrange-type curved hexahedral finite elements and a simple single-mode boundary condition, coupled with standard DFT and IDFT algorithms. The examples demonstrate excellent numerical properties of the technique, which appears to be the first time-from-frequency-domain FEM solver, primarily due to (i) very small total numbers of unknowns in higher order solutions, (ii) great modeling flexibility using large (homogeneous and continuously inhomogeneous) finite elements, and (iii) extremely fast multifrequency FEM analysis (the global FEM matrix is filled only once and then reused for every subsequent frequency point) needed for the inverse Fourier transform.