On the development of nonoverlapping and stable hybrid FETD-FDTD formulations

Abstract

A general framework to combine the finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) and the finite-element time-domain (FETD) formulations, both based on the vector wave equation, is proposed. In contrast to the existing stable hybrid FETD-FDTD, there is no transition layer between two subdomains. In addition, the stability of the proposed approach is analytically proved. This framework allows combining different FDTD and FETD formulations together. Particularly, a fully unconditionally stable hybrid method is proposed, which is proved to be energy conservative too. The key ingredient is a finite-element tearing and interconnecting method for electromagnetic problems with a new interface condition that preserves the stability of the numerical method in each region. Several numerical examples are considered in order to validate the proposed methods. The numerical results match with the reference solutions very well in all cases.