A discretisation method with the $H_{\rm div}$ inner product for electric field integral equations

Abstract

A discretisation method with the $H_{\rm div}$ inner product for the electric field integral equation~(EFIE) is proposed. The EFIE with the conventional Galerkin discretisation shows bad accuracy for problems with a small frequency, a problem known as the low-frequency breakdown. The discretisation method proposed in this paper utilises the $H_{\rm div}$ scalar product with a scalar coefficient for the Galerkin discretisation and overcomes the low-frequency problem with an appropriately chosen coefficient. As regards the preconditioning, we find that a naive use of the widely-used Calderon preconditioning is not efficient for reducing the computational time with the new discretisation. We therefore propose a new preconditioning which can accelerate the computation successfully. The efficiency of the proposed discretisation and preconditioning is verified through some numerical examples.