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Maxwell2D -- a 2D simulation of Maxwell's equations to demonstrate
physical phenomena associated with electromagnetic waves

Robin Hogan
[email protected]
5 August 2009


INTRODUCTION

This package contains the code for a 2D Finite-Difference Time-Domain
(FDTD) simulator that solves Maxwell's equations in the presence of an
arbitrary field of dielectric constant. Two versions of the program
are available:

  maxwell2d_gif  which produces animated gif files
  maxwell2d_nc   which reports the results in a NetCDF file

The latest version of the code, together with animations, can be found
here:

  http://www.met.rdg.ac.uk/clouds/maxwell/


TO COMPILE

This code is written in C and has been tested on Linux (Fedora 8 and SuSE)
only.  It should work with little modification on any flavour of Unix,
but if you want to run it on Windows you're on your own.

NetCDF library: The maxwell2d_nc program requires the NetCDF library
to be installed.  If you wish to create NetCDF files you will need to
download and install it, e.g. from

  http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/software/netcdf/

If you have a Linux distribution with the RPM package format, you
should install the netcdf and netcdf-devel packages.

Gif library: The maxwell2d_gif program requires the gif library to be
installed. To avoid very large files it is important to use compressed
gifs. Unisys held the patent on the LZW compression algorithm, but
this patent expired in 2003 or 2004 (depending where you
live). Unfortunately, many Linux distributions still only ship with a
version of the gif library that can only produce uncompressed gif
images.  If your operating system is in this category, then for your
convenience I have included the full library in

  giflib-4.1.6/

Simply enter this directory and type 

  ./configure
  make install

Then return to the original directory, enter the

  src/

directory and type

  make all

If all goes well, the executables "maxwell2d_nc" and "maxwell2d_gif"
should appear.


TO TEST

Enter the 

  examples/

directory.  Follow the instructions given in the README file there.