An Improved Formulation of the Spectral Element Method in Cylindrical Coordinates for the Analysis of Anisotropic-Filled Waveguide Devices

The spectral element method (SEM) is an advanced implementation of the finite element method (FEM), in which the internal nodes of each element are arranged at positions corresponding to the zeros of certain families of orthogonal polynomials. High accuracy can be obtained with SEM using a relatively small number of elements if compared with a FEM corresponding implementation. In this work, a new SEM in cylindrical coordinates is explored for the analysis of field propagation in inhomogeneous and anisotropic-filled waveguides. Numerical results show that our technique is efficient and accurate for modeling such waveguide devices.