Unified higher‐order curvilinear FDTD‐PMLs for 3‐D electromagnetics and advective acoustics

A systematic, non‐orthogonal FDTD algorithm for the unified and fully dual construction of curvilinear PMLs in 3‐D lossy electromagnetic and advective acoustic problems, is presented in this paper. Postulating a consistent mathematical formulation, the novel methodology introduces a set of general vector parametric equations that describe wave propagation in both media and facilitate the effective treatment of the remarkably complex, arbitrarily‐aligned (non‐uniform) source or mean flow terms, particularly at low frequencies. The discretization procedure is performed via accurate higher‐order FDTD topological concepts, which along with a well‐posed variable transformation, suppress the undesired lattice dispersion and anisotropy errors. Hence, due to these additional degrees of design freedom and their optimal establishment, the new stable PMLs (split‐field or Maxwellian) accomplish a critical attenuation of the evanescent, vorticity or elastic wave families by carefully accounting for every loss mechanism. Numerical investigation reveals the superiority of the proposed technique in terms of various open‐region, waveguide and ducted‐domain simulations.