CHARACTERISTIC-BASED ALGORITHMS FOR SOLVING THE MAXWELL EQUATIONS IN THE TIME-DOMAIN

Several numerical algorithms, developed in the computational-fluid-dyn amics community for solving the Euler equations, are found to be equal ly effective for solving the Maxwell equations in the time domain. The basic approach of these numerical procedures is to achieve the Rieman n approximation to the time-dependent, three-dimensional problem in ea ch spatial direction. The three-dimensional equations are then solved by a sequence of one-dimensional problems. This approach is referred t o as a characteristic-based method. The basic algorithm can be impleme nted for both finite-difference and finite-volume procedures, and has the potential to eliminate the spurious-wave reflections from the nume rical boundaries of the computational domain. The formulation and rela tive merit of the finite-difference and the finite-volume approximatio ns are presented, together with numerical results from these procedure s.