An Optimized PLRC-FDTD Model of Wave Propagation in Anisotropic Magnetized Plasma

Abstract

Abstract-Numerical dispersion is the main error source of the finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) method. In this paper, an optimized piecewise linear recursive convolution (PLRC) FDTD method with low numerical dispersion is presented first time for electromagnetic-wave propagation in anisotropic magnetized plasma. An optimized difference item which can achieve better approximation to the partial differential operator from transform domain is induced in this algorithm which decreases numerical dispersion. The item can be regarded as adding a correcting coefficient to conventional central difference format. And it is easy for programming and implementation. Numerical examples of electromagnetic pulse wave propagating in plasma demonstrate that the proposed optimized PLRC-FDTD method can not only reduce the numerical dispersion, but also improve precision, saving computational memory and computational time compared with the conventional PLRC-FDTD method. Same accuracy can be achieved when the spatial mesh size for the optimized PLRC-FDTD method is 2 times coarser as that in the conventional PLRC-FDTD method, corresponding to the computation time consumed in the optimized method is only 1/2 as that in the conventional one.