Development of an interface between ICEPIC and FDxD for HPM system integration

Summary form only given. The Improved Concurrent Electromagnetic Particle in Cell (ICEPIC) tool is an electromagnetic and electrostatic particle-in-cell code developed by Air Force Research Lab (AFRL) (ICEPIC User Reference Manual 20110215-653-gd028ed8, Aug. 2010, Air Force Research Lab). It is an excellent EM tool for analyzing High Power Microwave (HPM) sources such as magnetrons, klystrons and travelling wave tubes. FDxD is a Finite Different Time Domain (FDTD) code internally developed by Boeing. FDxD is tailored with source and subcellular coupling features for lightning and EMI/EMC applications in the aerospace industry and has been used in a variety of Boeing aircraft across the entire company. In this paper, we report the initial work on development of an interface between FDxD and ICEPIC. The objective is to create a hybrid EM simulation capability by taking the advantages of ICEPIC and FDxD in concern for analyzing HPM sources coupling into the complex and electrically large aircraft and other large platforms' cavities and equipment bays. This capability enables engineers to predict electromagnetic interference (EMI) conditions between an HPM payload and the aircraft electrical systems and avionics in early design phase when the design trade space is most open and solutions such as structural modifications and relocation of subsystems are still cost effective options.FDxD has a built-in Huygens source function to provide an effective way for simulating finer intricate details of antenna sources embedded in a larger environment. It was designed to eliminate the need to have a finer mesh surrounding the antenna and thus reduce mesh complexity and improve run time considerably. ICEPIC has a command line to dump electric and magnetic fields in a given rectangular box for the given time steps. We developed a code to re-arrange the ICEPIC dump field format to consistent with FDxD input Huygens source format. After format conversion, FDxD is able to calculate the microwave source simulated by ICEPIC in a larger environment. Figure 1 and 2 show the E-fields from a dipole with a corner reflector and a horn with a waveguide input, respectively. Both figures show good agreement among the E-field obtained from hybrid ICEPIC and FDxD, ICEPIC and FDxD alone. This is the initial work for hybrid FDxD and ICEPIC. Simulation and experiment result on real and complex aircraft platform will be reported later. The authors like to thank Frank Lenning for his expert advice on using FDxD. The authors also like to thank Drs P. J. Mardahl, N. P. Lockwood and A. D. Greenwood from AFRL for their advice on setup and get started in using ICEPIC.