Comparing EM Models to RCS Measurements for Building-Penetration Radar

For the DARPA VisiBuilding program, SRI International and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory are using a variety of electromagnetic (EM) simulation codes and measurement techniques to analyze how radar pulses interact with building structures and materials. Of primary interest is how interior wall and corner reflections are delayed, attenuated, and dispersed by the exterior wall materials. In this paper, we compare microwave frequency-domain radar cross section (RCS) chamber measurements of scale models of simple buildings to finite-element and finite-difference full-wave time-domain and ray-tracing models. The ability to accurately reconstruct the building from these models is compared with the reconstruction from chamber measurements. We observe that careful attention to the spatial sampling in the EM models is essential to achieving good reconstruction at the higher frequencies

A QR accelerated volume-to-surface boundary condition for finite element solution of eddy current problems

We are concerned with the solution of time-dependent electromagnetic eddy current problems using a finite element formulation on three-dimensional unstructured meshes. We allow for multiple conducting regions, and our goal is to develop an efficient computational method that does not require a computational mesh of the air/vacuum regions. This requires a sophisticated global boundary condition specifying the total fields on the conductor boundaries. We propose a Biot-Savart law based volume-to-surface boundary condition to meet this requirement. This Biot-Savart approach is demonstrated to be very accurate. In addition, this approach can be accelerated via a low-rank QR approximation of the discretized Biot-Savart law

A parallel computer implementation of fast low-rank QR approximation of the Biot-Savart law

In this paper we present a low-rank QR method for evaluating the discrete Biot-Savart law on parallel computers. It is assumed that the known current density and the unknown magnetic field are both expressed in a finite element expansion, and we wish to compute the degrees-of-freedom (DOF) in the basis function expansion of the magnetic field. The matrix that maps the current DOF to the field DOF is full, but if the spatial domain is properly partitioned the matrix can be written as a block matrix, with blocks representing distant interactions being low rank and having a compressed QR representation. The matrix partitioning is determined by the number of processors, the rank of each block (i.e. the compression) is determined by the specific geometry and is computed dynamically. In this paper we provide the algorithmic details and present computational results for large-scale computations

Investigation of Radar Propagation in Buildings: A 10 Billion Element Cartesian-Mesh FETD Simulation

In this paper large scale full-wave simulations are performed to investigate radar wave propagation inside buildings. In principle, a radar system combined with sophisticated numerical methods for inverse problems can be used to determine the internal structure of a building. The composition of the walls (cinder block, re-bar) may effect the propagation of the radar waves in a complicated manner. In order to provide a benchmark solution of radar propagation in buildings, including the effects of typical cinder block and re-bar, we performed large scale full wave simulations using a Finite Element Time Domain (FETD) method. This particular FETD implementation is tuned for the special case of an orthogonal Cartesian mesh and hence resembles FDTD in accuracy and efficiency. The method was implemented on a general-purpose massively parallel computer. In this paper we briefly describe the radar propagation problem, the FETD implementation, and we present results of simulations that used over 10 billion elements

An Explicit Time-Domain Hybrid Formulation Based on the Unified Boundary Condition

An approach to stabilize the two-surface, time domain FEM/BI hybrid by means of a unified boundary condition is presented. The first-order symplectic finite element formulation [1] is used along with a version of the unified boundary condition of Jin [2] reformulated for Maxwell's first-order equations in time to provide both stability and accuracy over the first-order ABC. Several results are presented to validate the numerical solutions. In particular the dipole in a free-space box is analyzed and compared to the Dirchlet boundary condition of Ziolkowski and Madsen [3] and to a Neuman boundary condition approach

A Parallel, High-Fidelity Radar Model A Parallel, High-Fidelity Radar Model

ABSTRACT Accurate modeling of Space Surveillance sensors is necessary for a variety of applications. Accurate models can be used to perform trade studies on sensor designs, locations, and scheduling. In addition, they can be used to predict system-level performance of the Space Surveillance Network to a collision or satellite break-up event. A high fidelity physics-based radar simulator has been developed for Space Surveillance applications. This simulator is designed in a modular fashion, where each module describes a particular physical process or radar function (radio wave propagation & scattering, waveform generation, noise sources, etc.) involved in simulating the radar and its environment. For each of these modules, multiple versions are available in order to meet the end-users needs and requirements. For instance, the radar simulator supports different atmospheric models in order to facilitate different methods of simulating refraction of the radar beam. The radar model also has the capability to use highly accurate radar cross sections generated by the method of moments, accelerated by the fast multipole method. To accelerate this computationally expensive model, it is parallelized using MPI. As a testing framework for the radar model, it is incorporated into the Testbed Environment for Space Situational Awareness (TESSA). TESSA is based on a flexible, scalable architecture, designed to exploit high-performance computing resources and allow physics-based simulation of the SSA enterprise. In addition to the radar models, TESSA includes hydrodynamic models of satellite intercept and debris generation, orbital propagation algorithms, optical brightness calculations, optical system models, object detection algorithms, orbit determination algorithms, simulation analysis and visualization tools. Within this framework, observations and tracks generated by the new radar model are compared to results from a phenomenological radar model. In particular, the new model will be used to simulate an S-band upgrade to the space fence

Electrostatic Breakdown Analysis using EMsolve and BEMSTER

Computer simulations modeling electrostatic behavior were used to simulate dielectric breakdown problems. These simulations modeled composite dielectric and conducting structures to see how much voltage difference or charge accumulation could occur before dielectric breakdown occurred in an air region. Two different computer codes were used for the analysis; EMSolve and BEMSTER. EMSolve, an existing LLNL internal finite element code, requires that a complete volume mesh of the problem be constructed. BEMSTER, a boundary-element code, was developed from an extension of the FEMSTER libraries which power EMSolve. The boundary-integral code offers the advantages of solving for accumulated charge and maximum electric field directly, and of only requiring a surface mesh. However, because it does not automatically solve for the voltage and electric field everywhere in space, post-processing and visualization are slightly more difficult than with EMSolve. Both codes were compared to several analytical solutions, and then applied to the structures of interest. Both codes showed good agreement with the analytic solution and with each other

Performance of low-rank QR approximation of the finite element Biot-Savart law

We are concerned with the computation of magnetic fields from known electric currents in the finite element setting. In finite element eddy current simulations it is necessary to prescribe the magnetic field (or potential, depending upon the formulation) on the conductor boundary. In situations where the magnetic field is due to a distributed current density, the Biot-Savart law can be used, eliminating the need to mesh the nonconducting regions. Computation of the Biot-Savart law can be significantly accelerated using a low-rank QR approximation. We review the low-rank QR method and report performance on selected problems