ABSTRACT
While FDTD was introduced to the electromagnetics community by Yee in 1966, it was nearly 1 decade before it was used to any great extent for actual applications. There were several reasons for this, including the lack of the necessary computer hardware capabilities. What really got FDTD started was an application for which it was uniquely well suited: determining the electromagnetic energy which would interact with and penetrate into an “almost” closed conducting object, such as an aircraft, due to an incident pulse of electromagnetic energy. This pulse may be due to natural phenomenon such as lightning, or it may be due to a nuclear detonation. Because the problem dealt with transient fields interacting with (to a good approximation) perfect conductors at relatively low frequencies (but not too low), it was ideally suited to FDTD.
