ESTIMATION OF FEM AND FDTD METHODS FOR SIMULATION OF ELECTROMAGNETIC CHARACTERISTICS OF POLARIZATION TRANSFORMING DEVICES WITH DIAPHRAGMS

Abstract

Context. Today, there is a rapid expansion of the range of modern branches of science and technology, which actively use satellite telecommunication systems to receive, process and transmit various information. These radioelectronic systems quite often require an increase of the volumes of information, which they are processing and transmitting. Increase of the volumes of transmitted information in two times can be achieved by using dual-polarization antenna systems and devices. Nowadays, most part of the specialists, who are engaged in the development of various modern polarization-processing microwave devices, carry out their numerical modeling and optimization using variational techniques, methods of integral equations, method of fields matching in partial regions. The methods with division of the internal region of the device into elementary cells are applied most actively. Among them in the time domain the most often used approach is finite difference method with the decomposition at hexagonal mesh, while and in the frequency domain the finite elements method with the adaptive tetrahedral mesh is applied. Therefore, the estimation of the speed and accuracy of these methods with the purpose of determination of more effective among them is a relevant problem. Objective. The goal of the research is comparison of speed and accuracy of the calculations of electromagnetic characteristics of waveguide polarizers using FEM and FDTD methods, as well as the comparison of the convergence of these methods for the analysis of polarization-processing microwave devices with diaphragms. Method. For the calculations and analysis of electromagnetic characteristics in the article we used the method of finite differences in the time domain (FDTD) and the method of finite elements in the frequency domain (FEM). In FEM the volume is split into the tetrahedral mesh cells. In FDTD the computational domain is divided into hexagonal mesh cells. Results. It was found that the convergence of voltage standing wave ratio for the waveguide polarizer is fast for both methods. It was obtained that the convergence of the characteristics of differential phase shift, axial ratio, and crosspolar discrimination of the developed microwave device turned out to be much more sensitive to the number of mesh cells used. Moreover, in the research it was obtained by calculations that the computation time by the finite elements method in the frequency domain is more than 2 times less than the corresponding time required for calculations by the finite difference time domain method. When using the finite elements method in the frequency domain the corresponding number of tetrahedral mesh cells is 10 times less than the number of hexagonal mesh cells, which are used in the finite difference time domain method. Conclusions. Performed investigations have shown that FEM in the frequency domain, which applies an adaptive tetrahedral mesh, is more efficient than the FDTD method for the calculations of phase and polarization characteristics of modern waveguide polarizers and other microwave devices for various applications.