We focus on developing fast, flexible and accurate computational methods for electromagnetics and multi-physics to model multi-domain systems. By combining analytical and numerical strategies, we create state-of-the-art techniques providing insight in the underlying mechanisms of complex and high-tech systems.

The Electromagnetic and Multi-Physics Modeling and Computation (EMPMC) lab is part of the electromagnetics group at Eindhoven University of Technology. The lab has a long-standing track record on developing modeling methods for electromagnetic scattering, with applications and research partners in industry and medicine. More recently, the research of the lab is being expanded to multi-physics phenomena in which one of the phenomena involved is electromagnetics. The EMPMC lab is chaired by prof.dr.ir. M. C. van Beurden.

The focus of the EMPMC lab is to develop fast and efficient modeling methods in which modern aspects of electromagnetic analysis, design, and detection challenges are addressed within the context of electrical engineering. Examples of electromagnetic analysis and design applications in industry are antennas, possibly on-chip or in-package, optical gratings for wafer metrology, and optical fibers. In medicine, electromagnetic-field penetration in the human brain, by means of e.g. transcranial magnetic stimulation, was recently studied in the EMPMC lab, which is relevant for addressing treatments for epilepsy. Examples of electromagnetic detection are found in applications like radar, wafer metrology, but also in medical imaging methods such as MRI.  More recently, due to the technology push in developments such as 5G/6G, miniaturization of entire systems, optical chips, and developments in medical imaging methods, other aspects outside the direct domain of electromagnetics are moving into analysis, detection, and design problems that were earlier purely electromagnetic in nature.

To address the modeling challenges in the fields of application, the group is actively researching a number of advanced methods for integral equations, among which the Linear Embedding via Green’s Operators (LEGO) and the spatial spectral method, which are of interest for large scattering problems. Additionally, methods are under investigation to construct efficient time-domain lattice Green functions to develop diakoptic modeling within the FDTD framework. One of the key aspects in these methods is that they are flexible in handling variation of parameters of interest for the design or detection problem. This freedom is exploited to offer fast evaluation of the electromagnetic fields, or derived quantities, to a designer or an optimization or detection algorithm. To address the additional challenges encountered in the domain of multi-physics, the lab has a renewed interest in time-domain formulations, including time-domain integral equations.