Locally implicit discontinuous Galerkin method for time domain electromagnetics

In the recent years, there has been an increasing interest in discontinuous Galerkin time domain (DGTD) methods for the solution of the unsteady Maxwell equations modeling electromagnetic wave propagation. One of the main features of DGTD methods is their ability to deal with unstructured meshes which are particularly well suited to the discretization of the geometrical details and heterogeneous media that characterize realistic propagation problems. Such DGTD methods most often rely on explicit time integration schemes and lead to block diagonal mass matrices. However, explicit DGTD methods are also constrained by a stability condition that can be very restrictive on highly refined meshes and when the local approximation relies on high order polynomial interpolation. An implicit time integration scheme is a natural way to obtain a time domain method which is unconditionally stable but at the expense of the inversion of a global linear system at each time step. A more viable approach consists of applying an implicit time integration scheme locally in the refined regions of the mesh while preserving an explicit time scheme in the complementary part, resulting in an hybrid explicit–implicit (or locally implicit) time integration strategy. In this paper, we report on our recent efforts towards the development of such a hybrid explicit–implicit DGTD method for solving the time domain Maxwell equations on unstructured simplicial meshes. Numerical experiments for 3D propagation problems in homogeneous and heterogeneous media illustrate the possibilities of the method for simulations involving locally refined meshes.