Inline Seams

The EMA3D® Inline Seam formalism allows the placement of seams on two-dimensional topological material surfaces. This can be useful when modeling such geometries as door seams, cracks, joints, or small spaces between structures. An inline seam can exist on PEC surfaces, isotropic material surfaces, and composite material surfaces. All inline seams must exist on two-dimensional topological surfaces or an error message will result in EMA3D and the program terminated. A thin gap is an actual gap, but an inline seam is a discontinuity that can be assigned resistive, inductive, and capacitive properties.

Only one inline seam segment can exist at any location and inline seam segments can appear in any order within the EMA3D input file. If two segments exist at the same location, with different impedance parameters, then an error message will result in EMA3D and the program terminated.

Like thin gaps, inline seams must be transformed to locations where the surface electric field is normal to the seam. All the arguments and considerations concerning the transformation from tangential thin gap fields to normal thin gap fields apply identically to seams. See Section 5.9.1 for associated discussions.