Prof. Jianming Jin
Y.T. lo Chair Professor, University of Illinois at Urbana
Champaign, Urbana, IL, USA
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Jian-Ming Jin is Y. T. Lo Chair Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering and Director of the Electromagnetics Laboratory and Center for Computational Electromagnetics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He has authored and co-authored over 240 papers in refereed journals and over 22 book chapters. He has also authored The Finite Element Method in Electromagnetics (Wiley, 1st ed. 1993, 2nd ed. 2002, 3rd ed. 2014), Electromagnetic Analysis and Design in Magnetic Resonance Imaging (CRC, 1998), Theory and Computation of Electromagnetic Fields (Wiley, 2010), co-authored Computation of Special Functions (Wiley, 1996), Finite Element Analysis of Antennas and Arrays (Wiley, 2008), and Fast and Efficient Algorithms in Computational Electromagnetics (Artech, 2001). His name appeared over 20 times in the University of Illinois’s List of Excellent Instructors.

He was elected by ISI as one of the world’s most cited authors in 2002. Dr. Jin has been a Fellow of IEEE since 2000, received the IEEE AP-S Chen To Tai Distinguished Educator Award in 2015, and was a recipient of the 1994 NSF Young Investigator Award and the 1995 ONR Young Investigator Award. He also received the 1997 Xerox Junior and the 2000 Xerox Senior Research Awards from the University of Illinois, and was appointed as the first Henry Magnuski Outstanding Young Scholar in 1998 and later as a Sony Scholar in 2005. He was appointed as a Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Air Force Research Laboratory in 1999. He received Valued Service Award and Technical Achievement Award from the Applied Computational Electromagnetics Society in 1999 and 2014, respectively.

The Fascinating World of Computational Electromagnetics

As an art and science for solving Maxwell’s equations, computational electromagnetics is a fascinating area for research and engineering application. Over the past five decades, computational electromagnetics has evolved into the most important field in the general area of electromagnetics. The importance of computational electromagnetics is due to the predictive power of Maxwell’s theory – Maxwell’s theory can predict design performances or experimental outcome if Maxwell’s equations are solved correctly. Moreover, Maxwell’s theory, which governs the basic principles behind electricity, is extremely pertinent in many engineering and scientific technologies such as radar, microwave and RF engineering, remote sensing, geoelectromagnetics, bioelectromagnetics, antennas, wireless communication, optics, and high-frequency circuits. Furthermore, Maxwell’s theory is valid over a broad range of frequencies spanning static to optics, and over a wide range of length scales, from subatomic to inter-galactic. Because of this, computational electromagnetics is a very important subject which has already impacted and will continue to impact many engineering and scientific technologies. In this presentation, we will review the past progress and current status of computational electromagnetics, and discuss its future challenges and research directions. We will first give an overview of computational electromagnetics methods and then use a variety of examples to demonstrate their applications.
Note: This talk is aimed at senior undergraduate and beginning graduate students.

Domain Decomposition for Finite Element Analysis of Large-Scale Electromagnetic Problems

Numerical discretization of large-scale electromagnetic problems often results in a large system of linear equations involving millions or even billions of unknowns, whose solution is very challenging even with the most powerful computers available today. In this presentation, we will discuss domain decomposition methods for finite element analysis of such large-scale electromagnetic problems. We will begin with a review of the basic ideas of the Schwarz and Schur complement domain decomposition methods, which include the alternating and additive overlapping Schwarz methods, the nonoverlapping optimized Schwarz method, and the primal, dual, and dual-primal Schur complement domain decomposition methods. We will then present three most robust and powerful nonoverlapping domain decomposition methods for solving Maxwell’s equations. The first is the dual-primal finite element tearing and interconnect (FETI-DP) method based on one Lagrange multiplier for static, quasistatic, and low-frequency electromagnetic problems. The second is the FETI-DP method based on two Lagrange multipliers for more challenging high-frequency electromagnetic problems. The third one is the optimized Schwarz method based on higher-order transmission conditions. We will discuss the relationship between the three methods and their advantages and disadvantages, and present many highly challenging problems to demonstrate the power and capabilities of the domain decomposition methods.

From the Finite Element Method to discontinuous Galerkin Time-Domain Method for Computational Electromagnetics

The past two decades have witnessed rapid development of the finite element time-domain (FETD) method for electromagnetic analysis. Today, the method has become one of the most powerful numerical techniques for simulating electromagnetic transient phenomena, performing broadband RF and microwave characterization, and modeling nonlinear electromagnetic devices. In this presentation, we will review the progress in the development of the FETD method for solving Maxwell’s equations mostly during the past ten years. If time permits, we will discuss FETD formulations, FETD analysis at very low frequencies, modeling of electrically and magnetically dispersive media, mesh truncation using perfectly matched layers and time-domain boundary integral equations, time-domain simulation of periodic structures with the Floquet absorbing boundary condition, time-domain waveguide port boundary conditions, Huygens-based domain decomposition algorithm, explicit FETD algorithms, and hybrid field-circuit simulation based on the FETD method. The second half of the presentation will be devoted to the discontinuous Galerkin time-domain (DGTD) method, which includes the motivation for its development, its relation to the FETD and finite volume time-domain (FVTD) methods, its formulation based on central and upwind fluxes, and its performance comparison with the explicit FETD methods. Throughout the presentation, we will present a variety of numerical examples to illustrate the importance and application of the topics discussed.

MultiPhysics Modeling in Computational Electromagnetics: Challenges and Opportunities

As computational methods for solving Maxwell's equations become mature, the time has come to tackle much more challenging multiphysics problems, which have a great range of applications in sciences and technologies. In this presentation, we will use five examples to illustrate the nature and modeling of multiphysics problems. The first example is related to electromagnetic hyperthermia, which requires solving electromagnetic and bio-heat transfer equation for the planning and optimization of the treatment process. The second concerns the heat problem in integrated circuits due to electromagnetic dissipated power, which requires an electrical-thermal co-simulation. The third example considers modeling of monolithic microwave integrated circuits, which consist of both distributive and lumped circuit components. The fourth is the simulation of vacuum electronic devices using the particle-in-cell method, which solves Maxwell's equations and particle kinetic equation, and the last example simulates the air and dielectric breakdown in high-power microwave devices by coupling electromagnetic modeling with various plasma models. With these examples, we will discuss the methodologies and some of the challenges in multiphysics modeling.