Minimizing the computational cost and memory requirements for the capacitance calculation of 3-D multiconductor systems

A new approach is presented which minimized the computational cost and memory requirements for capacitance calculations of three-dimensional multiconductor systems. The proposed approach, based on the integral equation method (IEM), calculated the capacitance of three-dimensional geometry of ideal conductors in two stages. In the first stage, the integral equation method was used to obtain the charge distribution on each conductor in isolation. In the second stage, the multiple interaction (coupling) among the conductors was included by applying the IEM to the whole structure and considering the charge distribution, obtained in the first stage, as a discretized entire domain basis function. The order of the interaction matrix was thus reduced to the order of conductors in the structure. The proposed method was tested for various geometries and it resulted in tremendous savings in computational time and memory storage; moreover, it gave very good accuracy in comparison with the classical integral equation method