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Research and development engineers working in aerospace and defense continually strive to extend the boundaries of what is technically possible and this extends to the specialized field of electromagnetic simulation technology. One branch in this community deals with the optimization of radar cross sections (RCS), while another concentrates on the influence of the surroundings (an airplane body on the performance of communication or radar antennas, for example). What both of these application areas have in common is the size of the electrical problem, which can typically run to many hundreds of wavelengths, and that the relevant structures are mainly surfaces and free space.

Tackling these problems is quite simply not feasible using standard volume discretization methods. CST has addressed these problem classes with the introduction of the Integral Equation solver (I-solver) for its CST MICROWAVE STUDIO (CST MWS). It enables the user to perform accurate 3D fullwave analysis of electrically large structures, which is particularly useful in military microwave applications. The I-solver is seamlessly integrated in the CST DESIGN ENVIRONMENT™ (CST DE). Engineers can take advantage of this easy to use interface and the sophisticated imports from a large variety of CAD formats to set up the models. The selection of the right solver is then just a mouse-click away.

The I-solver features a Method of Moments (MoM) discretization using a surface integral formulation of the electric and magnetic field integral equations. Due to the surface integral formulation the new solver uses far fewer elements than common volume methods for the described problem classes. Nevertheless, the numerical complexity of MoM is high and is not applicable to electrically large structures.

Reprinted with permission of MICROWAVE JOURNAL® from the August 2007 issue. ©2007 Horizon House Publications, Inc.

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•Technical Article: An Integral Equation Solver For Military Applications