Abstract
Meshless methods have attracted much attention in recent decades. The element-free method which originates from computational mechanics is modified and extended to the Helmholtz wave equation for the computation of the cutoff wavenumber of partially-filled dielectric waveguides. The method is validated by comparing with published results on rectangular, semicircular, half-loaded dielectric rod waveguides in the literature. Some problems of this method, such as treatment of boundary conditions, nodes arrangement are also addressed in the paper. It is found that the cutoff wavenumber can be easily and accurately determined by the element-free method without the complicated time consuming mesh generation process.