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MoM Matrix Generation Based on Frequency and Material Independent

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DOI: 10.1109/TAP.2012.2211325

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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ANTENNAS AND PROPAGATION, VOL. 60, NO. 12, DECEMBER 2012
MoM Matrix Generation Based on Frequency and
Material Independent Reactions (FMIR-MoM)
Greg Hislop, Member, IEEE, Nilufer Aslihan Ozdemir, Member, IEEE, Christophe Craeye, Senior Member, IEEE,
and David González Ovejero, Member, IEEE
Abstract—A novel and efficient method of moments (MoM)
matrix generation technique called the frequency and material
independent reactions for the method of moments (FMIR-MoM)
technique is presented. This new matrix generation algorithm
efficiently calculates impedance matrices while sweeping through
frequency, permittivity, conductivity, and/or permeability values.
For frequency sweeps it has computational and memory costs
comparable to those of interpolation techniques. It has the ad-
vantage over interpolation techniques in that it does not divide
the frequency range into segments and allows one to dynamically
update the precision. The technique expands the exponential of the
Green’s function into a Taylor series. This allows the problem to
be formulated as a summation, where each term consists of a real
valued matrix depending only on the geometry (discretization),
multiplied by a scalar dependent on the propagation constant.
The algorithm’s efficiency is obtained by calculating the geom-
etry-dependent matrices prior to sweeping through frequency or
material parameters.
Index Terms—Algorithms, antennas, computational electromag-
netics, dielectric constant, dielectric devices, dielectric measure-
ments, dielectrics, electromagnetics, frequency, moment methods,
permeability, permittivity, propagation constant, radar cross sec-
tion, Ultra wideband antennas.
I. INTRODUCTION
T HE surface integral-equation solution of radiation and scat-
tering problems using the method of moments (MoM), re-
quires a fixed propagation constant at a specific frequency and for
specific constitutive parameters [1]–[4]. Thus, when applied to
wideband problems or when one wishes to sweep through permit-
tivity, conductivity or permeability values, one must restart this
often computationally intensive problem. The frequency and ma-
terial parameters can be represented by specific values of the com-
plex propagation constant and complex medium impedance .
As will be proven later, the dependence on is trivial and one
can essentially consider the complex propagation constant as
representing all effects due to frequency and material parameters.
Considerable literature exists which addresses the need to restart
the MoM problem during frequency sweeps [5], [6], however,
frequency and material independent reactions for the method of
moments (FMIR-MoM) is the first which addresses the problem
Manuscript received January 04, 2012; revised May 25, 2012; accepted
July 19, 2012. Date of publication August 02, 2012; date of current version
November 29, 2012.
G. Hislop was with the ICTEAM/UCL, Belgium. He is now with the CSIRO
Earth Science and Resource Engineering, Queensland, Australia (e-mail: greg.
hislop@csiro.au).
N. A. Ozdemir, C. Craeye, and D. G. Ovejero are with the Institute of Informa-
tion and Communication Technologies, Electronics and Applied Mathematics
(ICTEAM), Université catholique de Louvain (UCL), Louvain la Neuve, Bel-
gium (e-mail: christophe.craeye@uclouvain.be).
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TAP.2012.2211325
0018-926X/$31.00 © 2012 IEEE
5777
of efficient matrix filling for completely arbitrary changes in the
propagation constant. Potential applications of this work include
but are not limited to: radar cross section measurements for di-
electric targets [7]–[10], design of antennas with dielectric com-
ponents and the measurement (by inverse methods) of the consti-
tutive parameters of a dielectric or magnetic material [11], [12].
The existing literature, addressing the problem of efficient
frequency sweeps, may be divided into two predominant cat-
egories: techniques based on the asymptotic waveform evalu-
ation (AWE) [5] and those that perform impedance matrix in-
terpolation [6]. The AWE performs the Taylor series expan-
sion of the MoM equation matrix [5]. It evaluates the deriva-
tives of the impedance matrix, with respect to a central fre-
quency and uses this information to obtain a Taylor series of the
currents or fields. The technique looses accuracy as the band-
width increases. However, this problem may be accounted for
either by using multiple expansion frequencies and/or by trans-
forming the Taylor series of current coefficients into a Padé
or another more wideband and stable expansion [8]. A signif-
icant advantage of this technique is that it only needs to invert
the impedance matrix at the central expansion frequency(ies)
[5]. Disadvantages include instability of the Padé expansion [8],
stagnation of the AWE moments as the order of expansion in-
creases [10] and a required expansion order which increases lin-
early with the size of the object [8]. The method has been applied
to lossy dielectric objects, whose complex permittivity is fixed
[7]–[10]. The AWE technique is widely used in the simulation
of radar cross sections [5], [7]–[10], [13].
Another approach to sweeping efficiently through frequen-
cies is to separate the problem into two stages: the filling of
the impedance matrix and the solving of the matrix equation.
Krylov subspace iterative methods such as GMRES [14],
[15] may be used for the latter stage. Generic accelerators
for matrix filling techniques exist, such as the adaptive cross
approximation (ACA) [16], [17], the incomplete QR algorithm
[18], [19] and the matrix decomposition algorithm (MDA)
[20], [21]. However, for frequency sweeps, it is more accurate
and efficient to use interpolation techniques or to combine such
techniques with the previously mentioned generic matrix filling
methods. Matrix interpolation relies on the slowly changing
nature of the impedance matrix as a function of frequency
[6], [22]–[25]. The original interpolation method [6], [22],
evaluates three impedance matrices across a given bandwidth
and uses quadratic interpolation for the points between these
frequencies. The technique has evolved over time with the use
of different interpolation schemes depending on the distance
between testing and basis functions [23], [24], the use of
spline based interpolation [23], and the incorporation of matrix
5778 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ANTENNAS AND PROPAGATION, VOL. 60, NO. 12, DECEMBER 2012

derivatives to facilitate an increase in the frequency range over and a phasor convention is used. The MoM matrix for
which interpolations remain accurate [25]. Advantages of these such an object is given by [3], [4], [30]
techniques include their speed and simplicity. Disadvantages
include the need to break large bandwidth problems into mul-
(1)
tiple smaller bands and an increase in memory consumption
as they must store three or four impedance matrices for each
frequency band. Finally and most importantly, using matrix The element of (for the th testing and th basis
interpolation for arbitrary complex permittivities would require function) is found using the electric field integral equation
a complicated 2-D interpolation.
The FMIR-MoM method does not belong to either of the
above described categories. This approach performs the accu-
rate and efficient generation of MoM matrices for any arbitrary
(2)
complex propagation constant or medium impedance, given
a homogeneous object with fixed discretization. It supports
where is the distance between source and obser-
sweeps in frequency, permittivity, conductivity or permeability
vation points, and are the observation and source surfaces,
and does not limit the bandwidth of the MoM problem as a
respectively, and and are the testing and basis functions
whole. The precision of the method may be dynamically in-
respectively, with no current components crossing the bound-
creased, while sweeping through propagation constant values.
aries (e.g., RWG functions [2]). One finds simply by re-
This comes with the same computational cost as if the precision
placing the “in” subscripts in (2) with “out.” In (1) the elements
was determined in advance. The FMIR-MoM technique is
of are found using the magnetic field integral equation
simple to understand and to implement. Its computational and
memory requirements are comparable to those of modern ma-
trix interpolation methods when sweeping through frequency (3)
only [25]. The novel method may be combined with iterative
solutions (e.g., GMRES) or fast matrix assembling (e.g., ACA and the elements of are generated by replacing the “in”
and QR), and will extend their field of efficient use, in terms of subscript with “out.” Note that (2) and (3) are independent of
problem size, prior to resorting to more complex approaches and that appears as a simple scalar in (1). Thus
such as using multipole expansions [26]. the effects of changes in impedance are trivial and the propa-
The technique uses a Taylor series expansion of the exponen- gation constant represents all effects of changing fre-
tial in the Green’s function. This expansion allows the matrix quency and material constitutive parameters in (2) and (3). For
filling problem to be separated into a computationally intensive PEC objects, only the upper left submatrix of (1) and thus (2)
component depending only on geometry, and a low-complexity are required. This section will first deal with (2) and then with
component, which accounts for the effects of the complex prop- (3).
agation constant. Thus the geometric component is generated
prior to the sweep, leaving only the propagation constant terms A. Electric Field Integral Equation
to be generated during the sweep, as the propagation constant
The integrand of (2) consists of two terms, the first with a
changes. It should be noted that it is common to expand the
factor and the second without. Due to this factor, (2) is split
Green’s function’s exponential when performing MoM anal-
into the sum of two integrals. Then, where is the distance
ysis; for example to integrate the singularity [27], [28] and to
between the centers of the basis and testing functions, a phase
enable the impedance matrix to be generated to a prescribed
term
precision [29]. However, the FMIR-MoM technique is the first
to use such an expansion to efficiently generate impedance ma-
(4)
trices, while sweeping through arbitrary values of the propaga-
tion constant and impedance. is factored out of the integrals. This is done to minimize the
This article is outlined as follows. The mathematical develop- maximum absolute value of the exponent of in (2) and thus
ment of the FMIR-MoM technique is given in Section II, results to minimize the error of its truncated Taylor expansion. The
are then presented for frequency, permittivity and conductivity exponent remaining inside the integrand is then expanded into a
sweeps on both a dielectric object and a perfectly electrically Taylor series about . These three operations transform
conducting (PEC) antenna in Section III, Section IV presents (2) into
a thorough discussion of the method and the experiments per-
formed before Section V concludes the paper.

II. MATHEMATICAL FORMULATION

Consider a lossy dielectric object with impedance
and propagation constant ,
where “in”/“out” denote the use of the constitutive parameters
for the mediums inside and outside the object respectively, is (5)
the angular frequency, is the permittivity, is the permeability
HISLOP et al.: MOM MATRIX GENERATION BASED ON FREQUENCY AND MATERIAL INDEPENDENT REACTIONS (FMIR-MOM) 5779

where are the elements of which approximates

, is the number of Taylor series terms and
is the index of each term. Rearranging (5) yields a summation
of terms each containing an easy to calculate factor, that is
dependent on , and a more complex factor which is a
function of purely geometric terms
(10)
Note that (10) will approximate the magnitude of the error but
is not guaranteed to be greater than it. A useful error estimate
may be formed, using an estimate of the impedance matrix’s root
mean square (RMS) error as a percentage of the RMS value of
the matrix. This error estimate is defined as

(11)

(6) where the summations are taken across a small set of the
total number of basis/testing function pairs, randomly selected
Thus, for each term in the Taylor series, two purely real or purely in advance.
imaginary (depending on ) matrices and are generated
and saved prior to sweeping through the various values. B. Magnetic Field Integral Equation
These two matrices are independent of and their indi- Section II-A developed an efficient MoM matrix filling
vidual elements are defined as method for the integral in (2) and the corresponding matrices
. This allows for the solution of problems involving
(7) only PEC objects. For dielectrics, however, the matrices
whose elements are defined in (3) must also be
evaluated. A similar approach to that of Section II-A may be
for [the first integral in (6)] and
used to develop an efficient matrix filling method for (3). First
the phase constant is factored out of the integral, the
(8) exponential is replaced by its Taylor series expansion and the
equation is rearranged to give
for [the second integral in (6)]. During the sweep, the
and matrices are loaded one at a time, multiplied by elemen-
tary terms and added together before finally being multiplied
( represents an element-by-element multiplication) by a ma-
(12)
trix of extracted phase factors (with elements ), as shown

where are the elements of which approximates

(9)
. Then performing the curl operation gives

Note that an additional real valued matrix is required to store

the values in (4). Interestingly, the series accuracy may be
increased, at any time during the sweep, by generating higher
order versions of the stored matrices. This comes at the same
computational cost as if they were generated in advance (as-
suming that the additional terms are added prior to multiplica-
tion by the extracted phase factor).
It is important to be able to establish a suitable value for
, according to the precision required for the MoM matrix.
This paper assumes that the error in (6) is approximated by its
th term, the magnitude of which is
(13)
Equation (13) represents a sum of terms where each term has
two factors, a simple factor dependent on and and a com-
putationally intensive factor dependent on the geometry and
, but independent of . Thus the geometry-dependent terms
may be generated in advance leaving only the scaling and ad-
dition of these terms to be done during the sweep. The stored
geometry terms consist of purely real/imaginary matrices
with the elements

(14)
5780 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ANTENNAS AND PROPAGATION, VOL. 60, NO. 12, DECEMBER 2012

where gives the binomial coefficients. Expanding the

and terms in the integrand of (14) gives

Fig. 1. MoM surface mesh used to represent the cube (units in cms). (19)

Equation (18) contains the singularity, while (19) contains

During the sweep, the matrices are loaded one at a time, both and terms. Both of these singularities are rou-
multiplied by the factor and summed together, prior to mul- tinely evaluated in an analytical fashion, by the standard MoM
tiplication by the extracted phase term as shown [28], [31], [32], when calculating (2) and (3). The same inte-
gration methods are used here, while the remaining terms of
(18) and (19) are integrated numerically. Note that the bino-
(15) mial expansions (18) and (19), and the singularity evaluations
[28], [31], [32] need only be performed for close function pairs.
FMIR-MoM uses the same threshold on as used by the stan-
As with (2) the elements of in (14) may be generated at any dard MoM. A suitable value being of the order of one tenth of
time, allowing for dynamic updates to the precision. the largest wavelength in the sweep.
The error present in (13) may be estimated using the same
procedure as used in Section II-A. The magnitude of the III. RESULTS
th term of (13) gives the following approximation
Two sets of numerical experiments have been performed. The
of the absolute value of the error:
first set of tests is reported in Section III-A and consists of filling
the and matrices in (1) for a given dielectric object
and various complex permittivities. In Section III-B, the
matrix is filled for a large ultrawideband (UWB) PEC antenna.
The calculation of (2) and (3) was implemented in the C++
language, as was the generation of the matrices (7), (8) and (14),
while the loading and combining of the matrices for any given
value was performed in Matlab. All tests were performed on
a Dell Latitude E6500 laptop computer with a 2.54 GHz CPU
(16) and 4 GB of RAM.

An error estimate with the same format as (11) is used to gauge A. A Lossy Dielectric Material
the accuracy of the reconstructed MoM matrix. This error esti- A cube with edge length 5 cm was used as the test object. A
mate is mesh (see Fig. 1) was generated using the GMSH package [33]
with 1050 RWG basis/testing functions. Both and
were evaluated at a range of real and complex values. The
(17) FMIR-MoM technique was compared against the direct evalua-
tion of (2) and (3). The error estimates defined in (11) and (17),
were evaluated with the size of set to 1000 basis/testing func-
tion pairs. The RMS errors between the approximated matrices
where represents the same set of basis/testing function pairs at iteration and the directly evaluated matrices, as a per-
as used in (11). centage of the RMS value of the directly generated matrices,
were calculated using
C. Evaluating the Singular Integrals
Singularities of the forms , and are present
in the integrands of (7), (8), and (14). Thus, special attention is (20)
required for the elements of , and which correspond
to spatially close function pairs. Regarding (7) and (8), the bi-
nomial expansion may be used to obtain where the summations are taken across all of the basis/testing
function pairs. Thus (20) is the quantity approximated by (11)
and (17).
First, was swept through a wide range of real values, rep-
resented by the relative permittivities of 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, and 32,
(18) while fixing the conductivity at 0 and the frequency at 1.5 GHz.
HISLOP et al.: MOM MATRIX GENERATION BASED ON FREQUENCY AND MATERIAL INDEPENDENT REACTIONS (FMIR-MOM) 5781

Fig. 2. Error estimates & actual errors for the lossless dielectric cube for varying . (a) (b) (c) (d) (e) (f) .

The sweep was stopped at a relative permittivity of 32, as this
represents only 9.4 functions per wavelength. For each permit-
tivity the RMS error (20) was calculated for both the electric and
magnetic integrals, as were the error estimates (11) and (17).
These quantities were found for and are re-
ported in Fig. 2(a)–(f). The time required to compute (2) and (3)
(for all elements of and ) was 42 sec per frequency,
while the FMIR-MoM technique required 2.3 sec for any given
and , at which all of the error estimates reported in
this section had decreased below 1%. The computational time
required for the stored matrices is of the order of times
the time required for (2) and (3) at a given . Having verified
that the method functions for changes in the real value of the per-
mittivity, the next step involved fixing the real part of the relative
permittivity at 8 (equivalent to 18.7 functions per wavelength)
and sweeping the imaginary part of the permittivity through the
values of 0, , , and . The results are reported
in Fig. 3(a)–(d). The radar cross section (RCS) of the cube was
found using both FMIR-MoM (using a 1% cutoff on the error
estimate) and CST’s integral solver for with
an interval of 0.1 for FMIR-MoM and 1 for CST (see Fig. 4).
This RCS test was repeated for
with an interval of 0.05 for FMIR-MoM and 0.5 for CST (see
Fig. 5).
B. UWB PEC Antenna
Having validated the FMIR-MoM technique for a lossy di-
electric, this section implements the algorithm on a UWB, PEC
antenna. The antenna under consideration is a 3D Vivaldi an-
tenna with a small ground plane operating from 800 MHz to 4
GHz [34], [35]. The antenna is represented by the surface mesh
in Fig. 6 and has a total of 1585 basis/testing functions. This
particular antenna is of interest as the mesh has been designed
with unusually large basis functions, up to 7 cm in length, in
5782
Fig. 3. Error estimates & actual errors for the lossy dielectric cube for varying
Fig. 4. RCS of dielectric cube versus , with
Fig. 5. RCS of dielectric cube versus , with
regions of low geometric detail. This decreases the precision
of the Taylor series in (5) and (12) as they must be evaluated
for large values of . Thus creating a challenge for the
FMIR-MoM approach (as would also be the case for traditional
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ANTENNAS AND PROPAGATION, VOL. 60, NO. 12, DECEMBER 2012
. (a) (b) (c) (d) .
Fig. 6. Surface mesh representing the 3-D Vivaldi antenna (units in cms).
.
frequency sweeping approaches). The test involved sweeping
through 201 different frequencies from 500 MHz to 4.5 GHz
and using (2) as well as the novel technique to obtain the reflec-
tion coefficient of the antenna. Fig. 7(a)–(d) give the error (20)
and the error estimate (11) at 1, 2, 3, and 4 GHz. Note that the
set contains 3000 function pairs randomly chosen in advance.
As expected, the technique’s performance is reduced by the un-
usually large basis functions and this is demonstrated by the in-
crease in the required value with frequency. Fig. 8 gives
the reflection coefficient of the antenna, as found using the two
techniques and stopping the FMIR-MoM algorithm when the
. error estimate (11) dropped below 1%. The measured reflection
coefficient closely matches and verifies the correctness of the
simulations [34], [35]. Finally Fig. 9 shows that, at 4 GHz and
, the error present in the larger basis/testing function
pairs (relative to the correct value) is several orders of magni-
tude larger than that of the smaller functions. While this is an
extreme test (the wavelength is only 7.5 cm) and some pairs of
HISLOP et al.: MOM MATRIX GENERATION BASED ON FREQUENCY AND MATERIAL INDEPENDENT REACTIONS (FMIR-MOM) 5783

Fig. 7. Error estimate and actual errors for the antenna at various frequencies. (a) 1 GHz. (b) 2 GHz. (c) 3 GHz. (d) 4 GHz.

Fig. 8. Reflection coefficient of the antenna (dB) using standard MoM, the
FMIR-MoM technique stopped at an estimated error of 1% and the measured
value.
large basis/testing functions (in regions of low significance) ex-
hibit significant errors, the impedance simulations remain accu-
rate [see Figs. 7(d)–9]. The processing time required to fill the
matrix, at any one frequency value, using the traditional method
was 97 sec. The FMIR-MoM technique’s error estimate dropped
below 1% after 3.1 sec at 1 GHz and 9.4 sec at 4 GHz (these
timings include the loading of matrices calculated prior to the
sweep).
IV. DISCUSSION
Considering convergence as occurring at a residual error of
1% or less, the examples in Section III-A all converged with
, where convergence was faster for larger wave-
lengths. The ratio between the computation times required by
the direct and novel evaluations, varied between 18.3 for the
smallest and 45.7 for the largest wavelength.
Fig. 9. Relative errors of all MoM matrix function pairs, against the length of
the largest function in each pair, at and 4 GHz.
The results of Section III-B demonstrate that the FMIR-MoM
technique works on complex objects and that its performance is
dependent on the size of the basis functions. The error estimate
converged to less than 1% with , corresponding
to an improvement in computation time of between 10 (smallest
wavelength) and 31 times (largest wavelength).
As the basis/testing function size increases, so does the
number of series terms required for convergence (see Fig. 9).
This can also be seen in Section III-A where needed to
be higher for higher absolute values of . The authors rec-
ommend separating problems, with variable sized basis/testing
functions, into subproblems: using different values of for
small and large basis/testing functions.
The required increase in with increased , may
be used to give an upper limit on the required for a given
matrix precision, by first filling the matrix at the highest required
value of .
Interpolation techniques [6], [22]–[25], which provide an al-
ternative for PEC structures in free space, also have reduced
5784 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ANTENNAS AND PROPAGATION, VOL. 60, NO. 12, DECEMBER 2012
TABLE I
COMPUTATIONAL COSTS INCLUDING, MEMORY (REAL VALUED
FLOATING-POINT NUMBERS), PRE-SWEEP COMPUTATIONAL COST AND REAL
VALUED MULTIPLICATIONS AND ADDITIONS PER SWEEP
accuracy as the basis functions’ electrical sizes increase. This
is due to an increased variation in the component
of (2), which they assume small enough to apply quadratic or
cubic interpolation. To counter the problem, interpolation tech-
niques decrease the range of frequencies over which they op-
erate. Thus interpolation and the AWE must break large fre-
quency ranges into multiple bands (which may overlap). How-
ever, the FMIR-MoM technique uses the same stored matrices
for all values of . Thus the FMIR-MoM technique main-
tains the lower frequency limit of the full MoM (2) and is only
limited at higher frequencies by the resolution of the mesh or
the truncation of the Taylor series (the value of ). Should
the error estimates (11) and/or (17) indicate that has been
set too small, higher order versions of (7), (8), and (14) may be
generated during a sweep at the same cost as if they had been
generated in advance. Interpolation techniques do not have an
equivalent property: the redistribution of interpolation points is
possible, but comes with limited flexibility if the previously ex-
isting points are reused.
A recent interpolation technique, that is superior to its prede-
cessors, is described in [25]. It requires the prior generation and
storage of three impedance matrices and the derivative of one
of these matrices, as well as a matrix of extracted phases (note
that FMIR-MoM does not need to differentiate MoM matrices).
Table I provides a computational comparison, where is the
number of bands into which [25] breaks the frequency range,
is the computational cost of generating using (2) and
is the number of basis functions. The cost of calculating the
extracted phase term must be added to the sweeping
cost of both techniques. Note that if one loads sized matrices
one at a time from the hard disk, both techniques have the same
memory cost (in RAM) as the direct evaluation of (2). This cost
is real valued floating-point RAM spaces.
All of the tests in Section III-A, excepting the case
(the mesh is overly sparse), converged with and the
technique in [25] has a reasonably wide bandwidth. Thus a first
order comparison is made, between the techniques, by setting
and . In doing so computational and memory
costs of the two approaches are equivalent. As the authors’ inter-
ests are in an efficient technique, which accounts for complex
propagation constants [11], [12], a detailed comparison is left
for future research.
The memory required by the FMIR-MoM technique to gen-
erate and for a lossy dielectric is
real valued floating-point numbers. The implementation used
in this paper loads matrices of size from the hard disk for
each and combination, as well as for , thus re-
ducing the RAM requirement to that of the direct method (i.e
). This is done to conserve RAM for large problems. As
a result, matrix loading dominates the computation time, rep-
resenting 56% and 87% of the time required for the dielec-
tric target and the antenna, respectively. Matrix loading is not
needed unless the memory requirements exceed the RAM avail-
able. The problem of matrix loading is of a similar extent for
interpolation techniques (see memory requirements in Table I).
The error estimates in (11) and (17) are used to approximate
the precision of the estimated MoM matrix and to establish the
stopping criteria. For the examples given, the true error and the
error estimate both dropped below the 1% cutoff at the same
value. The elements of were chosen randomly. This
ensured the selection of a distribution of function sizes, types,
separations and orientations, that reflects the distribution of the
population as a whole. The size of was kept small, ensuring
that the extra computation time devoted to error estimation was
negligible.
The error estimates (11) and (17) closely approximate the
true error but do not provide a guaranteed close upper bound.
Alternatively the Taylor series of the complex exponential
may be shown to possess the strict upper
bound of multiplied by the absolute value of
the expansion’s th term (where is the maximum
basis/testing function length) [36]. On the other hand, the
authors’ chosen criteria has the advantage of applying directly
to the error in the MoM matrix elements, while remaining easy
to evaluate.
FMIR-MoM can be easily extended to the analysis of mul-
tiple media. Both in the elementary case of junctions between
two media and the more complex case of three or more touching
media the MoM matrix can be constructed exclusively from the
integral (2) and (3) [30].
The ACA calculates and manipulates MoM matrices in the
compressed form , where the matrix di-
mensions satisfy , [16], [17]. The and ma-
trices are calculated by evaluating one element at a time
along, appropriately chosen, alternating rows and columns [16],
[17]. FMIR-MoM may be performed on one matrix element at
a time and the operations in (9) and (15) may be performed on
matrices in the ACA’s compressed form. Thus, if , and
may be shown to be rank deficient it will be feasible to com-
bine FMIR-MoM with the ACA and obtain the benefits of both
techniques. The exact algorithm design and implementation of
this concept is left for future work.
The fast multipole method (FMM) calculates elements
of by obtaining the Far-Field patterns of widely spaced
basis/testing functions and convolving them with a transla-
tion operator (as a function of direction) [26]. A simplified
form of FMIR-MoM might allow for the efficient calculation
of basis/testing function far field patterns across sweeps on
frequency or material parameters. A Taylor expansion of this
operation leads to
(21)
HISLOP et al.: MOM MATRIX GENERATION BASED ON FREQUENCY AND MATERIAL INDEPENDENT REACTIONS (FMIR-MOM)
where is a unit vector in the considered fair-field direction,
joins the integration point to the center of the region to which
the basis/testing function is assigned, joins the center of the
basis function to the center of the region and . Such
a technique would allow for efficient sweeps through complex
at the expense of increased memory consumption. For
close function pairs FMM calculates (2) and (3) to evaluate the
corresponding elements of . Thus FMIR-MoM may be directly
applied to the calculation of these elements. Implementation of
a combined FMIR-MoM and FMM algorithm is left for future
research.
As , the sweeps per-
formed through complex permittivities, also verify that the
FMIR-MoM algorithm may be used to sweep through complex
permeabilities.
V. CONCLUSION
This paper has presented a new efficient MoM matrix filling
technique (the FMIR-MoM algorithm), that allows for sweeping
through complex propagation constants. It allows one to effi-
ciently sweep through frequency, permittivity, conductivity, or
permeability. The technique relies on a Taylor series expansion
of the Green’s function’s exponential to separate the problem
into propagation constant dependent and geometry-dependent
terms. The geometry-dependent matrices are generated prior to
sweeping. Then, during the sweep, these real valued matrices
are multiplied by elementary factors dependent on the propaga-
tion constant and are added together to efficiently give the MoM
matrix for a given propagation constant. Significant improve-
ments in matrix fill times have been demonstrated for various
objects.
Comparisons indicate that the FMIR-MoM technique has
comparable memory and computational costs as published
interpolation methods (for PEC structures in free space). How-
ever, interpolation methods must divide large frequency ranges
into smaller segments, while the novel technique does not. The
FMIR-MoM technique also has the advantage of being able
to increase matrix precision dynamically during a parameter
sweep. This is done by generating higher order matrices and
adding them to the already established series.
Possible directions of future work have been identified such
as the application of FMIR-MoM to the adaptive cross approx-
imation and fast multipole method.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The authors would like to thank Dr. R. Sarkis of the Univer-
sité catholique de Louvain who designed and provided the Vi-
valdi antenna of Fig. 6.
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Greg Hislop (M’07) was born in Australia, in 1978.
He received the B.S. degree in electrical and elec-
tronic engineering and the Ph.D. degree in inverse
scattering techniques for the imaging of shallowly
buried objects with ground penetrating radar from
Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane,
Australia, in 2000 and 2006, respectively.
From 2005 to 2008, he worked at the CSIRO’s
ICT Centre in Sydney, Australia. In this position,
he worked on the application of phase retrieval
techniques to THz imaging applications as well
as the detection of faults in the trunks of plantation pines using radar. From
2009 to 2012, he worked on direction of arrival finding techniques, novel
permittivity measurement methods and electromagnetic simulation algorithms
at the Université catholique de Louvain (Belgium). He currently works in the
Department of Earth Science and Resource Engineering at CSIRO in Brisbane,
Australia.
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Nilufer Aslihan Ozdemir (M’07) received the B.Sc.
and the M.Sc. degrees in electrical and electronics
engineering from the Middle East Technical Univer-
sity, Ankara, Turkey, in 1997 and 2000, respectively,
and the Ph.D. degree in electrical and computer engi-
neering from The Ohio State University, Columbus,
in 2007.
Since December 2007, she has been with the Uni-
versité catholique de Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve,
Belgium, as a Postdoctoral Researcher. Her research
has focused on integral equation based numerical
solution of electromagnetic scattering and radiation problems.
Christophe Craeye (M’99–SM’11) was born in Bel-
gium, in 1971. He received the B.S. degree in elec-
trical engineering and the B.A. degree in philosophy
from the Université catholique de Louvain (UCL),
Brussels, Belgium, in 1994. He received the Ph.D.
degree in applied sciences from the same university
in 1998.
From 1994 to 1999, he was a Teaching Assistant at
UCL and carried out research on the radar signature
of the sea surface perturbed by rain, in collaboration
with the Rain-sea interaction facility of NASA, Wal-
lops Island (VA) and with the European Space Agency. From 1999 to 2001, he
stayed as a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Eindhoven University of Technology,
The Netherlands. His research there has been carried out in the framework of
the Square Kilometer Array radio telescope project, and consisted of studying
a technology based on phased-arrays traditionally used for broadband radar ap-
plications. In this framework, he also stayed at the University of Massachusetts
in the Fall of 1999, and worked with the Netherlands Institute for Research
in Astronomy in 2001. In 2002 he started an antenna research activity at the
Université catholique de Louvain, where he is now a Professor. He stayed at
the University of Cambridge (Astrophysics and Detectors group) from January
to August 2011. His research interests are finite antenna arrays, wideband an-
tennas, small antennas, metamaterials and numerical methods for fields in pe-
riodic media, with applications to communication and sensing systems. His re-
search is funded by Région Wallonne, European Commission, FNRS and UCL.
Dr. Craeye served as an Associate Editor of the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON
ANTENNAS AND PROPAGATION from 2004 to 2010, he is now an Associate Ed-
itor for IEEE ANTENNAS AND WIRELESS PROPAGATION LETTERS. In 2009, he
received the 2005–2008 Georges Vanderlinden prize from the Belgian Royal
Academy of Sciences.
David González Ovejero (M’12) was born in
Gandía, Spain, in 1982. He received the Electrical
Engineering degree from the Univesidad Politécnica
de Valencia (UPV), Valencia, Spain, in 2005. He
received the Ph.D. degree from the Université
catholique de Louvain, Brussels, Belgium, in 2012
From January 2006 to September 2007, he worked
as a Researcher at the UPV. He currently works as a
Postdoctoral Fellow at the ICTEAM Institute of the
Université catholique de Louvain. His research in-
terests are in the fields of computational electromag-
netics and the analysis and design of antenna arrays.