A New Method for Transient Analysis of Discontinuous Coupled Lines

Time domain analysis of discontinuous coupled lines is derived from existing methods applied to continuous ones. This analysis is implemented by decomposing any set of partially coupled discontinuous lines into "tubes". A tube of order N being constituted by N uniformly coupled continuous lines of equal lengths, the previous discontinuous structure is then seen as a cascade of tubes of different orders. As a consequence, the corresponding load and source matrices brought in cascade will be of different orders. A method dealing with the shrinkage and dilatation of these matrices in order to match their orders is developed. Thereby, complex structures involving coupled lines can be analyzed after reduction of both the number of tubes and the number of kinds of interfaces met.