From Microscopic to Macroscopic Description of Composite Thin Panels: A Road Map for Their Simulation in Time Domain

In this paper, we show a simulation strategy for composite dispersive thin-panels, starting from their microscopic characteristics and ending into a time-domain macroscopic model. In a first part, we revisit different semianalytic methods that may be used to obtain the S-parameter matrices. The validity of them is assessed with numerical simulations and experimental data. We also include some formulas that may be used to tailor the shielding effectiveness of panels in a design phase. In a second part, we present an extension to dispersive media of a subgridding hybrid implicit–explicit algorithm finite difference time domain (FDTD) devised by the authors to deal with that kind of materials. The method, here presented and applied to the FDTD method, is a robustly stable alternative to classical impedance boundary condition techniques. For this, a previous analytical procedure allowing to extract an equivalent effective media from S-parameters is presented, thus making this road map able to simulate any kind of dispersive thin layer. A numerical validation of the algorithm is finally shown by comparing with experimental data.