Application of physical spline finite element method (PSFEM) to fullwave analysis of waveguides

In this paper, the physical spline finite element method (PSFEM) is applied to the fullwave analysis of inhomogeneous waveguides. Combining (rectangular) edge element and the PSFEM, the cubic spline interpolation is successfully applied to the wave equation. For waveguide problems, the resulting nonlinear eigenvalue problem is solved by a simple iteration method in which the initial estimate is taken as the linear Lagrange interpolation, and then the solutions are improved by a few iterations. The bandwidth of the resultant matrix from the PSFEM is the same as that of linear Lagrange interpolation and is sparse. As a result, sparse matrix solver can be used. Three typical examples are demonstrated and compared with the analytical solutions and with the linear Lagrange interpolation results. It is observed that the present method converges much faster than the Lagrange interpolation method.