A p‐adaptive method for electromagnetic wave propagation

Summary The discontinuous Galerkin FEM is used for the numerical solution of the three‐dimensional Maxwell equations. Control of errors in the numerical level for the divergence‐free constraint of the magnetic field can be obtained through the use of divergence‐free vector bases. In this work, the so‐called perfectly hyperbolic formulation of the Maxwell equations is used to retain both divergence‐free magnetic field and in the presence of charges to satisfy the Gauss constraint for the electric field at the numerical level. For both approaches, it is found that higher‐order approximations have favorable effect on the preservation of the divergence constraints and that the perfectly hyperbolic formulations retains these errors to a lower level. It is shown that high‐order accuracy in space and time is achieved in unstructured meshes using implicit time marching. For nonuniform meshes, local resolution refinement is used using p‐type adaptivity to ensure accurate electromagnetic wave propagation. Thus, the potential of the method to reach the required higher resolution in anisotropic meshes and obtain accurate electromagnetic wave propagation with reduced computational effort is demonstrated.