A preconditioner is proposed for Laplace exterior boundary value problems on multi-screens. To achieve this, the quotient-space boundary element method and operator preconditioning are combined. For a fairly general subclass of multi-screens, it is shown that this approach paves the way for block diagonal Calderón preconditioners which achieve a spectral condition number that grows only logarithmically with decreasing mesh size, just as in the case of simple screens. Since the resulting scheme contains many more degrees of freedom than strictly required, strategies are presented to remove almost all redundancy without significant loss of effectiveness of the preconditioner. The performance of this method is verified by providing representative numerical results. Further numerical experiments suggest that these results can be extended to a much wider class of multi-screens that cover essentially all geometries encountered in practice, leading to a significantly reduced simulation cost.

We have identified the sources of the different problems plaguing the EFIE at low frequencies in both the frequency and the TD, as well as their traditional cures. Despite their apparent effectiveness, these techniques have been shown to have a limited applicability because they introduce their own set of problems which include the high computational burden of the LS decomposition and its effect on the high-refinement conditioning of the FD-EFIE and the numerical instabilities introduced by the treatment of the TD-EFIE. Techniques leveraging qH projectors, immune from the aforementioned side-effects, have been introduced to address the different aspects of the low-frequency breakdown of the FD formulation and of the large time step breakdown of its TD counterpart. In case of the FD, using projectors allows the same re-scaling of the solenoidal and non-solenoidal parts of the RWG space as traditional LS, but it has the added benefits of not requiring identification of the global loops of the structure as well as not introducing any further high-refinement ill-conditioning. In the TD case, the projectors are still used to separate the loop and star parts of the discretized space, but this separation is used to apply the correct derivative and integrative terms to the different parts of the operators. Coupled with an adequate mixed time-discretization scheme, this technique fully addresses the low-frequency limitations of the TD-EFIE. Along with presenting these purely theoretical concepts, we have provided implemen-tation related hints, allowing the techniques presented in this chapter to be reliably and readily implemented into existing solvers. Finally, while we have addressed their low-frequency breakdown, both EFIE formulations still suffer from a high-refinement breakdown. While in standard low-frequency scenarios, a curing of low-frequency issues may suffice, for more pathological cases techniques addressing both break-downs may be required. Strategies based on qH projectors and Calderon identities have recently been introduced for the frequency and TD formulations [23, 40] and should be used in this case.

Boundary integral equation methods for analyzing electromagnetic scattering phenomena typically suffer from several of the following shortcomings: 1) ill-conditioning when the frequency is low; 2) ill-conditioning when the discretization density is high; 3) ill-conditioning when the structure contains global loops (which are computationally expensive to detect); 4) incorrect solution at low frequencies due to a loss of significant digits; and 5) the presence of spurious resonances. In this article, quasi-Helmholtz projectors are leveraged to obtain magnetic field integral equation (MFIE) that is immune to drawbacks 1)-4). Moreover, when this new MFIE is combined with a regularized electric field integral equation (EFIE), a new quasi-Helmholtz projector-combined field integral equation (CFIE) is obtained that also is immune to 5). The numerical results corroborate the theory and show the practical impact of the newly proposed formulations.

The time domain-electric field integral equation (TD-EFIE) and its differentiated version are widely used to simulate the transient scattering of a time dependent electromagnetic field by a perfect electric conductor (PEC). The time discretization of the TD-EFIE can be achieved by a space-time Galerkin approach or, as it is considered in this contribution, by a convolution quadrature using implicit Runge-Kutta methods. The solution is then computed using the marching-on-in-time (MOT) algorithm. The differentiated TD-EFIE has two problems: 1) the system matrix suffers from ill-conditioning when the time step increases (low frequency breakdown) and 2) it suffers from the DC instability, i.e., the formulation allows for the existence of spurious solenoidal currents that grow slowly in the solution. In this article, we show that 1) and 2) can be alleviated by leveraging quasi-Helmholtz projectors to separate the Helmholtz components of the induced current and rescale them independently. The efficacy of the approach is demonstrated by numerical examples including benchmarks and real-life applications.