Efficient Electromagnetic Modeling of Multidomain Planar Layered Medium by Surface Integral Equation

A novel electromagnetic modeling method for multidomain planar layered medium (MD-PLM) by surface integral equation (SIE) is proposed. The MD-PLM refers to the whole space that is separated into multiple PLM volumes, e.g., the infinite-sized PLM background with inserted finite PLM objects or multilayered parallel-plate structures. In the conventional SIE method for this scenario, only the exterior domain is considered as PLM that is modeled by layered medium Green's functions (LMGFs), while the interior domain is treated by the multidomain homogeneous SIE. However, in this work, the surface equivalence formulation for this special scenario is reestablished by the LMGFs. Then, both the exterior and interior domains are considered as PLM that is modeled by the corresponding LMGFs and SIE in each subdomain. As a result, only the boundary of each sub-PLM domain is required to be discretized rather than the interfaces of each interior medium, which is different from the way in conventional SIE. Consequently, compared with the conventional SIEs, the proposed method can reduce a large quantity of unknowns and significantly increase the efficiency by reducing the memory consumption. By some numerical examples, the performance of this method is evaluated and compared with the conventional methods. The validity and efficiency of the newly proposed method are also well demonstrated in the examples.