An IE-ODDM-MLFMA Scheme With DILU Preconditioner for Analysis of Electromagnetic Scattering From Large Complex Objects

For electrically large complex electromagnetic (EM) scattering problems, huge memory is often required for most EM solvers, which is too difficult to be handled by a personal computer (PC) even a workstation. Although the multilevel fast multipole algorithm (MLFMA) effectively deals with electrically large problems to some extent, it is still time and memory consuming for very large objects. In order to further reduce the CPU time and the memory requirement, a hybrid algorithm, based on the overlapped domain decomposition method for integral equations (IE-ODDM), MLFMA and block-diagonal, incomplete lower and upper triangular matrices (DILU) preconditioner, is proposed for the analysis of electrically large problems. The dominant memory requirement for plane wave expansions in the three processes of aggregation, translation and disaggregation in the MLFMA is drastically reduced by the first two techniques. The iterative procedure for each overlapped subdomain solved by the MLFMA is effectively sped up by the DILU preconditioner. After integrating these techniques, the proposed hybrid algorithm is more efficient in computing time and memory requirement compared to the conventional MLFMA and is more suitable for analyzing very large EM scattering problems. Enough accurate solution can be obtained within quite a few outer iterations, where an outer iteration means a complete sweep for all the subdomains. Some numerical examples are presented to demonstrate its validity and efficiency.