Solving electromagnetic problems using a novel symmetric FEM-BEM approach

This paper presents a novel symmetric finite element method-boundary element method (FEM-BEM) formulation for solving unbounded electromagnetic problems. The proposed method offers two very attractive features: 1) it is variational, leading to a symmetric system of equations and 2) the meshes for the computations of FEM and BEM can be nonconformal, leading to decoupled computations of FEM and BEM. The accuracy and efficiency of the method are studied for both electromagnetic radiation and scattering problems.