An Unconditionally Stable and Energy-Preserving Domain-Decomposition Method for Transient Modeling of Large-Scale Electromagnetic Problems

Abstract

The purpose of this contribution is to introduce a dual-primal finite-element tearing and interconnecting (DP-FETI) method for the time-domain simulation of large electromagnetic problems. The most distinctive feature of the proposed method is that the continuity of the first-time derivative of the electric field intensity is enforced across the interfaces, unlike the existing formulations in electromagnetics. A theoretical proof is provided to demonstrate that this transmission condition guarantees unconditional stability and energy preservation of the method. Since the condition number of the global interface problem is greatly reduced compared to the standard finite-element time-domain (FETD) method, an iterative solver converges in far fewer iterations. This significantly reduces the simulation time, particularly when implemented on parallel computers. It is numerically shown that the method is scalable with respect to the number of subdomains and the time-step size. The numerical results for simulation of a cavity and bandgap devices are presented to demonstrate capability, accuracy, and efficiency of the proposed time-domain DP-FETI (TD-DP-FETI).