Circuit-oriented FEM: solution of circuit-field coupled problems by circuit equations

A general circuit-oriented, full-wave, finite-element method (FEM) is proposed to analyze the coupled problem between circuits and fields both in frequency and in time domains. The electromagnetic field problem is modeled by an equivalent electrical network obtained by the Whitney finite-element equations. The presence of circuit components in the field domain is easily taken into account introducing the lumped circuit components directly in the field equivalent electrical network. Simple test configurations are analyzed by a CAD circuit simulator to show the performances of the proposed circuit-oriented method.