On a Low-Frequency and Contrast Stabilized Full-Wave Volume Integral Equation Solver for Lossy Media

Abstract

In this paper we present a new regularized electric flux volume integral equation (D-VIE) for modeling high-contrast conductive dielectric objects in a broad frequency range. This new formulation is particularly suitable for modeling biological tissues at low frequencies, as it is required by brain epileptogenic area imaging, but also at higher ones, as it is required by several applications including, but not limited to, transcranial magnetic and deep brain stimulation (TMS and DBS, respectively). When modeling inhomogeneous objects with high complex permittivities at low frequencies, the traditional D-VIE is illconditioned and suffers from numerical instabilities that result in slower convergence and in less accurate solutions. In this work we address these shortcomings by leveraging a new set of volume quasi-Helmholtz projectors. Their scaling by the material permittivity matrix allows for the re-balancing of the equation when applied to inhomogeneous scatterers and thereby makes the proposed method accurate and stable even for high complex permittivity objects until arbitrarily low frequencies. Numerical results, canonical and realistic, corroborate the theory and confirm the stability and the accuracy of this new method both in the quasi-static regime and at higher frequencies.