A spatial high-order hexahedral discontinuous Galerkin method to solve Maxwell's equations in time domain

In this paper, we present a non-dissipative spatial high-order discontinuous Galerkin method to solve the Maxwell equations in the time domain. The non-intuitive choice of the space of approximation and the basis functions induce an important gain for mass, stiffness and jump matrices in terms of memory. This spatial approximation, combined with a leapfrog scheme in time, leads also to a fast explicit and accurate method. A study of the dispersive error is carried out and a stability condition for the proposed scheme is established. Some comparisons with other schemes are presented to validate the new scheme and to point out its advantages. Finally, in order to improve the efficiency of the method in terms of CPU time on general unstructured meshes, a strategy of local time-stepping is proposed. (c) 2006 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.