Evaluation of 4-D reaction integrals via double application of the divergence theorem

The use of the method of moments to solve surface integral equations is one of the most popular numerical techniques in electromagnetic modeling and analysis. This method requires the accurate and efficient numerical evaluation of iterated surface integrals over both source and testing domains. In this paper, we propose a scheme for evaluating these 4-D interaction integrals between pairs of arbitrarily positioned and oriented elements. The approach is based on applying the surface divergence theorem twice, once on the source and once on the test domain. When the integrations are reordered as two outer contour integrals plus two inner radial integrals, the initial radial integrations provide significant smoothing of the underlying singular integrands. The method is numerically validated for static and dynamic kernels arising in the electric field integral equation, i.e., for kernels with 1/R singularities, and linear basis functions. The proposed formula to evaluate 4-D reaction integrals can be extended to different kernels and to different elements, e.g., to curved or volumetric elements, and to basis functions of higher order.