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2017
Journal Article
Titel
Adaptive and automated multilevel uniform space division for acceleration of high-frequency electromagnetic simulations [EM Programmer's Notebook]
Abstract
An adaptive volumetric space-partitioning algorithm for the acceleration of high-frequency electromagnetic (EM) simulations based on ray tracing is presented in this article. Similar to most acceleration algorithms for ray tracing, which are common in ray-tracing EM simulations as well as in computer graphics, the algorithm aims at minimizing the number of ray?surface intersection tests. However, the proposed algorithm is based on a relatively simple-toimplement uniform spatial-partitioning scheme. The drawbacks of this method are compensated by repeating the same scheme recursively on multiple levels. The user or programmer can reuse the implementation of this algorithm on all subdivision levels. Apart from that, the proposed algorithm is very user friendly in the sense that it only needs an upper limit for the number of geometric elements inside a volumetric space-partition element as an input parameter, which also can be guessed roughly by the algorithm, and automatically creates the required subdivision grid. In that process, the number and distribution of geometric elements in the simulation scenario are taken into account by the algorithm. The test cases studied in this article indicate that runtimes of a shooting-and-bouncing-rays (SBR) algorithm can easily be cut by 90% or even more when applying this optimization procedure, depending on the scenario to be simulated.