Modeling Electromagnetic Propagation Through Novel Materials and Configurations

In this SBIR project, we propose to expand the brick tracing algorithm originally developed at the University of Michigan for indoor wave propagation modeling to a fully 3-D “Block Tracing” algorithm, in which a large structure is decomposed into a number of elementary blocks, either periodic or aperiodic. There will not be any constraining assumptions on the type or geometry of the blocks or on the wave incidence angles. The blocks can be made of complex materials with anisotropic electric and magnetic properties or with periodic insertions such as in metamaterials. Since each block is independent, one will be able to handle arbitrary numbers of conjoined dissimilar materials. The full-wave solutions of the individual blocks are calculated using regular or periodic FDTD or MoM solvers. The interactions among all the various and possibly dissimilar blocks are calculated using an iterative algorithm that captured all the edge and corner effects. All the algorithms will be fully integrated within EM.CUBE’s modeling environment, which is equipped with a powerful 3-D CAD modeler capable of handling a large variety of CAD formats such as STEP, IGES, STL, OpenFlight, etc.