Matrix-Free Method for Maxwell-Thermal Co-Simulation in Unstructured Meshes

Existing electrical-thermal co-simulation methods require solving a system matrix when handling inhomogeneous materials and irregular geometries discretized into unstructured meshes. In this work, a matrix-free method is developed for co-simulating full-wave Maxwell’s equations and the thermal diffusion equation in time domain. The method is free of matrix solutions regardless of the shape of the element used for space discretization. A theoretical stability analysis is also developed for the coupled electrical and thermal analysis, which is nonlinear in nature. Numerical experiments have validated the accuracy and efficiency of the proposed method.