Analysis of a UWB hemispherical antenna array in FDTD with a Time Domain Huygens methods

Electromagnetic modeling is needed in a wide variety of large and complex situations. Existing numerical techniques such as finite difference time domain (FDTD) can, in principle, solve any problem no matter how large or complicated given a sufficiently powerful computer. However, in practice, there remain problems which require more computer power than is available. Recently, the time-domain Huygens (TDH) approach has been shown to be effective for enabling large problems such as propagation on body area networks (BANs) to be modeled in FDTD. In this paper, it is shown that the much larger problem of the conformal antenna array, which is used in the MARIA breast cancer tumor detection system, is also very amenable to this technique with even greater savings in computer resources. Accurate results are obtained using less that a tenth of the resources needed to solve the same problem using existing advanced FDTD tools. The details of how this method is applied, and the choices which need to be made, are discussed.