BLOCK MATRIX PRECONDITIONER METHOD FOR THE ELECTRIC FIELD INTEGRAL EQUATION (EFIE) FORMULATION BASED ON LOOP-STAR BASIS FUNCTIONS

In this paper, electromagnetic scattering problems are analyzed using an electric field integral equation (EFIE) formulation that is based on loop-star basis functions so as to avoid low-frequency instability problems. Moreover, to improve the convergence rate of iterative methods, a block matrix preconditioner (BMP) is applied to the EFIE formulation which is based on loop star-basis functions. Because the matrix system resulting from the conventional method of moments is a dense matrix, a sparse matrix version of each block matrix is constructed, followed by the inversion of the resultant block sparse matrix using incomplete factorization. Numerical results show that the proposed BMP is efficient in terms of computation time and memory usage.