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Updated: May 2, 2026

Finite Element Modelling of a Cellular Electric Microenvironment
Published on: May 18, 2021
Robust computation of dipole electromagnetic fields in arbitrarily anisotropic, planar-stratified environments
Kamalesh Sainath1, Fernando L Teixeira1, Burkay Donderici2
1ElectroScience Laboratory, The Ohio State University, 1330 Kinnear Road, Columbus, Ohio 43212, USA.
Abstract:
We develop a general-purpose formulation, based on two-dimensional spectral integrals, for computing electromagnetic fields produced by arbitrarily oriented dipoles in planar-stratified environments, where each layer may exhibit arbitrary and independent anisotropy in both its (complex) permittivity and permeability tensors. Among the salient features of our formulation are (i) computation of eigenmodes (characteristic plane waves) supported in arbitrarily anisotropic media in a numerically robust fashion, (ii) implementation of an hp-adaptive refinement for the numerical integration to evaluate the radiation and weakly evanescent spectra contributions, and (iii) development of an adaptive extension of an integral convergence acceleration technique to compute the strongly evanescent spectrum contribution. While other semianalytic techniques exist to solve this problem, none have full applicability to media exhibiting arbitrary double anisotropies in each layer, where one must account for the whole range of possible phenomena (e.g., mode coupling at interfaces and nonreciprocal mode propagation). Brute-force numerical methods can tackle this problem but only at a much higher computational cost. The present formulation provides an efficient and robust technique for field computation in arbitrary planar-stratified environments. We demonstrate the formulation for a number of problems related to geophysical exploration.
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