Composite B-Spline Current Deposition and Interpolation Operators for Thin-Wire Finite-Difference Time-Domain Simulations

TL;DR

This paper introduces composite B-spline current deposition and interpolation operators for thin-wire FDTD simulations, ensuring charge conservation and reducing parasitic currents in antenna modeling.

Contribution

The authors develop a family of composite B-spline regularizations that exactly satisfy charge conservation and improve simulation accuracy for thin-wire antennas.

Findings

Regularizations achieve charge conservation to machine precision.

Orientation-independent impedance values are obtained in numerical experiments.

Naive regularizations produce unphysical parasitic currents.

Abstract

Holland-Simpson thin-wire finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) simulations of obliquely oriented closed-loop antennas exhibit persistent low-frequency parasitic currents because the current-deposition operator fails to conserve charge. Together with an interpolation operator that samples the tangential electric field along the wire, this deposition operator can be realized as a regularization of distributions against a regularized delta function supported on the wire. We show that charge conservation requires the deposited current to be discretely divergence-free when the wire carries a constant current, and we introduce a family of composite B-spline regularizations that satisfy this condition to machine precision. Exact evaluation of the coupling line integrals is achievable because the B-spline kernels are piecewise polynomial with breakpoints known a priori, allowing composite Gauss-Legendre quadrature with subinterval breakpoints at every grid-plane crossing. Taking the interpolation operator as the discrete adjoint of the deposition operator preserves skew-symmetry and ensures that a discretely irrotational electric field drives no net electromotive force around a closed loop. Numerical experiments on a center-fed dipole and on circular and square loop antennas show that the proposed regularizations yield orientation-independent impedance values consistent with known characteristics, whereas a naive trilinear regularization produces unphysical parasitic low-frequency currents in closed loops.