Unconditionally-stable time-domain approach for uncertainty assessment in transmission lines

Uncertainties characterizing the per-unit-length parameters of transmission lines (TL) may have a significant impact on the properties of the propagating voltage and current waves that deterministic models tend to overlook. In this paper, we present an unconditionally-stable finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) algorithm that calculates the statistics of the involved field quantities, provided that the variability of the line characteristics is known. Being free from time-step restrictions, the proposed scheme is an extension of the standard stochastic FDTD method and exhibits better efficiency, esp. in densely discretized computational domains. Indicative results verify that uncertainty quantification in TL problems is possible in a reliable manner, even when larger than usual time-steps are selected.