State-of-the-Art, Trends, and Directions in Computational Electromagnetics

Electromagnetic devices are ubiquitous in present day technology. Indeed, electromagnetism has found and continues to find applications in a wide array of areas, encompassing both civilian and military purposes. Among the former, applications of current interest include those related to communications (e.g. transmission through optical fiber lines), to biomedical devices and health (e.g. tomography, power-line safety, etc), to circuit or magnetic storage design (electromagnetic compatibility — EMC—, hard disc operation), to geophysical prospecting, and to non-destructive evaluation (e.g. crack detection), to name but just a few. Equally notable and motivating are applications in defense which include the design of military hardware with decreased signatures (“virtual prototyping”); automatic target recognition — ATR— (e.g. bunkers, mines and buried ordnance, etc); propagation effects on communications and radar systems (e.g. over complex terrains); tactical antenna design; etc. Although the principles of electromagnetics are well understood (see §2), their application to practical configurations of current interest, such as those that arise in connection with the examples above, is significantly complicated and far beyond manual calculation in all but the simplest aspects. These complications typically arise from geometrical and/or compositional complexity in the underlying structures (e.g. circuits, military hardware, biological tissue), from the intricacies of the electromagnetic fields (especially at higher frequencies), or from both. The significant advances in computer modeling of electromagnetic interactions that have taken place over the last two decades, on the other hand, have made it possible to shift the classical “trial and error” design paradigm for electromagnetic devices to one that