Publications [#283204] of Steven A. Cummer

Papers Published

1. Cummer, SA, An Analysis of New and Existing FDTD methods for isotropie cold plasma and a method for improving their accuracy, Ieee Transactions on Antennas and Propagation, vol. 45 no. 3 (December, 1997), pp. 392-400, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), ISSN 0018-926X [8.558654], [doi]
   (last updated on 2023/06/01)

   Abstract:
   Over the past few years, a number of different finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) methods for modeling electromagnetic propagation in an isotropic cold plasma have been published. We have analyzed the accuracy and stability of these methods to determine which method provides the greatest accuracy for a given computation time. For completeness, two new FDTD methods for cold plasma, one of which is based on the concept of exponential fitting, are introduced and evaluated along with the existing methods. We also introduce the concept of cutoff modification which can be easily applied to most of the FDTD methods, and which we show can improve the accuracy of these methods with no additional computational cost. Von Neumann's stability analysis is used to evaluate the stability of the various methods, and their accuracy is determined from a straightforward time-and-space harmonic analysis of the dispersion and dissipation errors. Results of numerical experiments to verify the accuracy analysis are presented. It is found that for lowloss plasma, the PLRC method [4] is the most accurate, but the method of Young [1] can use less memory and is nearly as accurate. In this low-loss plasma regime, cutoff modification can significantly reduce the error near cutoff at the expense of slightly greater error at lower frequencies. For strongly collisional] plasmas, the PLRC method also provides the most accurate solution. © 1997 IEEE.

   Keywords:
   Finite difference method;Time domain analysis;Convergence of numerical methods;Calculations;Harmonic analysis;Computer simulation;Mathematical models;