Improving condition number and convergence of the surface integral-equation method of moments for penetrable bodies

Abstract

Most of the surface integral equation (SIE) formulations for composite conductor and/or penetrable objects suffer from balancing problems mainly because of the very different scales of the equivalent electric and magnetic currents. Consequently, the impedance matrix usually has high- or ill-condition number due to the imbalance between the different blocks. Using an efficient left and right preconditioner the elements of the impedance matrix are balanced. The proposed approach improves the matrix balance without modifying the underlying SIE formulation, which can be selected solely in terms of accuracy. The numerical complexity of this preconditioner is O(N) with N the number of unknowns, and it can be easily included on any existing SIE code implementation.