Radar cross section of perfectly conducting spheres coated with a certain class of radially inhomogeneous dielectrics

The geometrical optics technique is applied to obtain the reflected electric field from a perfectly conducting sphere coated with a special class of spherically inhomogeneous dielectrics. The result is compared to the second-order approximation which is obtained by asymptotic theory. Numerical computations of the percent error involved in computing the monostatic cross section using the geometrical optics solution instead of the higher order solution have been performed for
50 \leq ka \leq 1000
. Also, the effect of coating a perfectly conducting sphere with a radially inhomogeneous dielectric of the diverging or converging kind is discussed.