$\mathcal {H}$-Matrix Accelerated Solution of Surface–Volume–Surface EFIE for Fast Electromagnetic Analysis on 3-D Composite Dielectric Objects

An efficient fast direct algorithm based on the hierarchical ($\mathcal {H}$-) matrices is presented for solution of the radiation problems on piecewise homogeneous dielectric objects using Method of Moment (MoM) discretization of the surface–volume–surface electric field integral equation (SVS-EFIE). The SVS-EFIE for the composite objects introduces independent surface electric current density on the boundary of each region. Therefore, different from the traditional Poggio–Miller–Chang–Harrington–Wu–Tsai formulation, in the SVS-EFIE, the object regions can be meshing independently according to their local properties which improves the flexibility and efficiency of the proposed method. It also makes the proposed algorithms appropriate for the analysis of both multiscale and large-scale composite structures. The numerical results from the proposed fast method are provided for the high-loss biological tissues from bioelectromagnetics applications and agree well with the analytical Mie series solution and commercial software. The CPU time and memory cost of the required $\mathcal {H}$-matrix operations are analyzed in details and verified through several numerical experiments. The new computational framework allows for fast direct solution of 3-D radiation and scattering problems of moderate electrical size with $O(P^{\alpha } \log ^2 P)$ CPU time and $O(P^{\alpha } \log P)$ memory complexity, $P$ being the number of surface unknowns produced by the MoM discretization, and $1\leq \alpha \leq 1.5$ being a geometry-dependent parameter.