Adaptive Hybrid Finite Element/Difference method for Maxwell's equations: an a priory error estimate and efficiency

Journal article, 2010

In this work we extend our previous study where an explicit adaptive hybrid finite element/finite difference method was proposed for the numerical solution of Maxwell's equations in the time domain. Here we derive a priori error estimate in finite element method and present numerical examples where we indicate the rate of convergence of the hybrid method. We compare also hybrid finite element/finite difference method with pure finite element method and show that we devise an optimized method. In our three dimensional computations the hybrid approach is about 3 times faster than a corresponding highly optimized finite element method. We conclude that the hybrid approach may be an important tool to reduce the execution time and memory requirements for large scale computations.