ABSTRACT
Numerical techniques for calculating electromagnetic fields surpassed analytical techniques. Most undergraduate electromagnetics texts contain sections on numerical methods for calculating fields. Classroom and technical presentations make use of electromagnetic movies in which the viewer watches a very colorful display of a gaussian pulse striking an object and scattering. The computer has become a critical part of electromagnetics. Computational electromagnetics is the simulation of Maxwell’s equations and their variations on a computer. Numerical approaches to solving Maxwell’s equations find the fields in either the time domain or frequency domain. Time-domain models contain many frequencies and can model transient behavior. Frequency-domain methods calculate solutions for one frequency at a time and are appropriate for steadystate behavior. The time-harmonic form of Maxwell’s equations is a function of space and frequency but not time. Consequently, this formulation requires the specification of boundary values.
