Resistive Sheet Boundary Condition-Based Nonconformal Domain Decomposition FE-BI-MLFMA for Electromagnetic Scattering From Inhomogeneous Objects With Honeycomb Structures

Abstract

A flexible and efficient resistive sheet boundary condition (RSBC)-based hybrid finite element-boundary integral-multilevel fast multipole algorithm (FE-BI-MLFMA) is presented for computing electromagnetic scattering from inhomogeneous objects with microwave-absorbing honeycomb structures. In the proposed algorithm, each nonmagnetic and high lossy material coated unit cell wall of the honeycomb is first approximated by the multilayered RSBC as a zero-thickness resistive sheet to eliminate the computational burden due to the extremely thin and multilayered characteristics of the coated unit cell wall. Then, the RSBC is incorporated into the FE-part of the FE-BI-MLFMA formulation. To further reduce the burden of meshing complicated objects involving cellular structures after RSBC approximation, the hybrid conformal and nonconformal domain decomposition method (DDM) of the FE-BI-MLFMA, which integrates the nonconformal Schwarz DDM-FE and the simplified discontinuous Galerkin (S-DG), is employed to bring significant flexibility and versatility in geometry modeling and mesh generating. An effective block low-rank multifrontal solver-based domain decomposition finite-element method (FEM)-absorbing boundary condition (ABC) preconditioner is constructed to speed up the solution of the FE-BI equations using locally approximated integral operators for the BI part. Numerical examples are given to demonstrate the accuracy, capability, and performance of the proposed algorithm, including a high-definition complicated fighter model with antenna array, multilayer dielectric radome, and microwave-absorbing honeycomb structures.