Solving Maxwell's equations using the ultra weak variational formulation

We investigate the ultra weak variational formulation for simulating time-harmonic Maxwell problems. This study has two main goals. First, we introduce a novel derivation of the UWVF method which shows that the UWVF is an unusual version of the standard upwind discontinuous Galerkin (DG) method with a special choice of basis functions. Second, we discuss the practical implementation of an electromagnetic UWVF solver. In particular, we propose a method to avoid the conditioning problems that are known to hamper the use of the UWVF for problems in general geometries and inhomogeneous media. In addition, we show how to implement the PML in the UWVF to accurately approximate physically unbounded problems and discuss the parallelization of the UWVF. Three dimensional numerical simulations are used to examine the feasibility of the UWVF for simulating wave propagation in inhomogeneous media and scattering from complex structures.