Hi Ian, Thanks for your interest in Firedrake. You could definitely solve Maxwell's equations in real space in Firedrake, even using the right exterior calculus discrete function spaces. It will also work in parallel for free. I'm less sure whether we can do Fourier space. I think I'd need to see the formulation. In particular, we can't currently solve PDEs over the complex numbers - although there are some work arounds for this. (Complex is definitely on the wish list but it will only happen if I manage to attract the right masters student to work on it). Regards, David On Tue, 5 Jul 2016 at 14:35 Ian Thompson <I.R.Thompson@bath.ac.uk> wrote:

Hello all,

I saw Firedrake at the Bath HPC day, I work in physics and we do a lot of fibre optic research. This includes modelling Maxwell’s equations across a 2D mesh that describes a cross-section of a fibre. Traditionally we solve this using a finite element method and solving in Fourier space. Is Firedrake suitable for solving such problems? Looking at the documentation Firedrake can load meshes from other programs, to solve in Fourier space would it be sufficient to define the equations in Fourier space and load a mesh that corresponds to the Fourier transform of our real space structure. Or can Firedrake support the transform itself? Would Firedrake be capable of solving the equations in real-space? In principle there is no problem with solving in real-space, its just been neater in the past. Currently we use COMSOL which is expensive and slow due to a lot of unnecessary (for our purposes at least) overhead and lack of parallel licensing. Sorry for so many questions but I am quietly excited at using a neater, nicer solver.

Cheers Ian _______________________________________________ firedrake mailing list firedrake@imperial.ac.uk https://mailman.ic.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/firedrake