This week, we released a new textbook on our site, Finite-element Methods for Electromagnetics. It joins the books Principles of Charged-particle Acceleration and Charged-particle Beams in our collection of free resources for scientists and engineers.
My interest in electronic texts started in 1999. I got a notice from Wiley-Interscience that Principles of Charged-particle Acceleration (published in 1986) was being taken out of print. This is a wrenching moment for an author, watching three years of work float into limbo. Considering that basic particle acceleration physics is a relatively timeless topic and that the publisher graciously reverted the copyright, I decided to find a new life for the book. I first tried Dover Press, but they thought the topic was too esoteric (a real head-scratcher, considering their current catalog). Then I got the idea to generate an electronic version and make it available on the web. Because my main goal was to save the book from oblivion, I decided to distribute it with no advertisements, restrictions or registrations. There were few full-length books available at the time, and many of these were crude scans. I decided to produce a compact PDF version that would approach the quality of the original text. I wrote the book in Wordstar, with a special ad-on program for Greek letters and equations (this was 1984, after all!). Although I created a custom program to ease the conversion to WordPerfect, the activity required extensive hand corrections and took several months. In the end, it was worth the effort. The PDF file preserved the original figures and pagination of the book with a length of only 10 MB. Since its release, over 20,000 copies have been downloaded. It was even mentioned on Slashdot (to the astonishment of my son).
Finite-element Methods in Electromagnetics was originally published in 1997 as Field Solutions on Computers by CRC Press (now a division of Taylor and Francis). Although the publisher wanted to keep the book in print, I received permission to distribute an electronic version through the kind efforts Ashley Gasque at Taylor and Francis. The book was originally written in WordPerfect, so it would seem that the conversion would be easy. Alas, in the intervening 12 years I fell in love with Latex. I was determined to produce a stylish book with perfectly-formatted equations. I did as much as I could with wp2latex.exe and then wrote yet another program to clear things up and number the equations. After only two months, the final product is ready.
I wrote the book when I was in the middle of developing the TriComp program suite and I was enthusiastic about learning numerical techniques and seeing how much physics could be squeezed into a set of triangles. Here’s the official description
Finite-element Methods for Electromagnetics covers a broad range of practical applications involving electric and magnetic fields. After introducing numerical methods with a thorough treatment of electrostatics, the book moves in a structured sequence to advanced topics. These include magnetostatics with non-linear materials, permanent magnet devices, RF heating, eddy current analysis, electromagnetic pulses, microwave structures, and wave scattering.The book also covers essential supporting techniques such as mesh generation, interpolation, sparse matrix inversions, and advanced plotting routines.
The book is a great companion to any of our Toolkits and our SATE educational package. You can download it at: