The development of an hp-adaptive finite element procedure for electromagnetic scattering problems

The development of an hp-adaptive edge element procedure for the simulation of two-dimensional electromagnetic scattering problems on hybrid meshes of triangles and quadrilaterals is described. The interest in this paper is the accurate prediction of the scattering width for simulations involving a single frequency incident wave. Sharp, constant free, error bounds on the scattering width output are obtained by employing an a posteriori procedure. The elemental contributions to the bound gap are used to drive an adaptive solution process, with the aim of improving the accuracy of the computed output. A novel extension to previous work, is the proposed reduced-order model for the economical calculation of the bound gap for all viewing angles of the scattering width. The theory is supported by numerical examples. This paper constitutes the full length version of the paper that was originally submitted in an extended abstract form for the 2002 Robert J. Melosh medal competition for the best student paper on finite element analysis. (C) 2003 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.