Introduction to the smoothed particle hydrodynamics method in electromagnetics

The smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) method is a mesh-free method that is characterized by an easy adaptability and an ability to track moving particles. In this paper, the fundamentals of SPH and its corrective smoothed particle method (CSPM) are introduced in detail and those two are compared in terms of consistency. The CSPM formulation for electromagnetics in time domain (SPEM) is presented and an investigation of the effect of particle distribution on the accuracy of SPEM is carried out. The results are compared to those of a finite difference time domain solution and analytic one. It is found that SPEM has a high potential in computational electromagnetics, and that consistency restoring is required for irregular particle distributions.