FINITE-ELEMENT METHOD SOLUTIONS OF FIELD DISTRIBUTIONS IN LARGE CAVITIES

To make possible the application of the three-dimensional finite element method to electrically large problems, it is combined with the analytical solutions of arbitrary large cavity with aperture. In this paper, detailed analysis for this hybrid method is presented. The element matrices necessary for coupling the finite element method to analytical solutions are given. The proposed hybrid method significantly reduces the number of unknown since only the inhomogeneity needs to be discretized. Thus computer memory and storage demands are reduced. In addition, this hybrid method employs the edge element which is not expected to produce spurious solutions. Also, the formulation presented in this paper preserves the sparsity of the finite element matrix, and does not require any matrix inversion. This new hybrid method is used to compute the field distributions in various partially filled rectangular enclosures. The results match well with the pure edge-based finite element method and analytical solutions.