Interactive pre- and post-processing tools for finite-difference time-domain codes.

摘要

Practical three-dimensional electromagnetic modeling has traditionally been hampered by insufficient computing power. Recent advances in computer hardware are beginning to remove this difficulty, and one can expect that this trend will continue for the foreseeable future. To exploit this increased computer power and to solve more realistic problems, researchers have developed numerous algorithms appropriate for 3-D calculations and have built large general-purpose computer codes around them. In spite of this technical and theoretical progress, two practical difficulties remain: providing the computer code with an accurate description of a particular problem and viewing the end results of the calculation. Researchers at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory have been developing and using a new finite-difference, time-domain (FDTD) code over the last few years. This code, TSAR, is currently being used on a wide range of electromagnetic scattering, coupling, and propagation problems. Some of the geometries of interest are large and quite detailed, requiring meshes with more than a million cells. To efficiently deal with these large problems, we have developed a set of pre and post-processing tools to be used in conjunction with the TSAR FDTD code. This set of utilities consists of a solid-model based mesh generator, a mesh verifier, and a color/surface plotter. These tools all run on graphics workstations and, due to their highly interactive nature, are quite easy to use. For added convenience, some of the workstations are connected to a videotape system. With this arrangement, users can record complex time-varying results in a convenient and portable format. We anticipate that the poster talk associated with this paper will include a videotape demonstration of these capabilities.