readme

a full 3D simulation of electromagnetic waves with efficient absorbing boundary a full 3D simulation

So, finally I managed to write some info stuff for all this...

radarFDTD was developed while I was writing my final thesis to get my
'Physik-Diplom' which is roughly comparable to a master degree. I
started with a very, very easy simulation which can be hacked into a
computer within a few hours now, which only allowed a fully
three-dimensional simulation of electromagnetic waves without any
boundary conditions and materials.

While moving on everything got a bit more difficult, after inserting
materials into the code (which is still very, very slow - just imagine
doing "if's" every now and then to determine which material is at this
spot...); also the materials are very simple, each yee-cell has only one
number assigning a material to this cell. This should be changed soon,
since it might cause problems in certain situations.

The final things introduced into the program were highly efficient
absobing boundary conditions proposed by Berenger in 1994 (for a
citation, please have a look at the end of this file). These were
modified by Fang and Wu in 1996 who proposed the "Generalised Perfectly
Matched Layers" (Don't fear I won't go into detail here, if you are
eager to learn more about these ABCs (absorbing boundary conditions),
drop me a mail or get that paper.)

I spent most of my time to get these things to work, in the end I had to
hunt down a bug, which I eventually found after two tideous months of
searching, which was, of course, just a tiny typo :-(. To get a idea
where this error was located have a look at the file ComponentUpdate.c.

INSTALL/USAGE

I have not included something like ./configure; make; make install since
it is firstly quite unnecessary for this thing: it should just compile
with a simple make. Secondly, there is only one executable file which
you can compile to any place you think you might need it (even to
/usr/local/bin).

A detailed overview about the usage of radarFDTD can be found in the
attached perl-script manual.pl, which generates text, man, latex and
html output (as long as pod2xxx is installed) when started.

MISC

What else do you need to know? 

Well, if you are able to read and understand German, you can download my
thesis and read about some of the simulations I have done. The URL
currently is (May 2000)
http://cupido.geophys.nat.tu-bs.de/radarfdtd/index.html, if this is not
valid anymore, please drop me an email.

CITATIONS

@Article{Berenger1994,
author = 	 {J.--P. Berenger},
title = 	 {A Perfectly Matched Layer for the Absorption of
Electromagnetic Waves},
journal = 	 {Journal of Computational Physics},
year = 	 {1994},
volume = 	 {114},
pages = 	 {185--200},
}

@Article{Berenger1996,
author = 	 {J.--P. Berenger},
title = 	 {Three--Dimensional Perfectly Matched Layer for the
Absorption of Electromagnetic Waves},
journal = 	 {Journal of Computational Physics},
year = 	 {1996},
volume = 	 {127},
pages = 	 {363--379},
}

@Article{Fang1996,
author = 	 {J. Fang and Z. Wu},
title = 	 {Generalized Perfectly Matched Layer for the Absorption of
Propagating and Evanescent Waves in Lossless and Lossy Media},
journal = 	 {IEEE Transactions on Microwave Theory and Techniques},
year = 	 {1996},
volume = 	 {44},
number = 	 {12},
pages = 	 {2216--2222},
month = 	 {December},
}