Radar Cross Section Prediction Using Iterative Physical Optics With Physical Theory of Diffraction

A new approach is presented to predict radar cross section (RCS) of electrically large conducting geometries using iterative physical optics (IPO) in conjunction with physical theory of diffraction (PTD). IPO is based on iterative refinement of physical optics (PO) currents to include multiple reflections. However, IPO does not yield sufficient accuracy in diffraction dominant regions since it does not properly include effects of edge diffractions. Hence, the proposed approach includes diffraction effects using PTD, which introduces edge currents. Diffracted fields due to these edge currents are radiated on triangular facets to modify the PO currents before IPO iterations. Scattered fields are computed from converged IPO surface currents and PTD edge currents. A new set of PTD edge currents excited by the fields due to the IPO currents are also found and the fields radiated by these PTD edge currents are added to the scattered fields. Therefore, interactions between the surface and edge currents are included. Computations are accelerated by parallel processing using message passing interface (MPI). Monostatic and bistatic RCS are predicted using the proposed approach for tail-wing and trihedral corner reflector geometries. The IPO-PTD results are compared with method of moments (MoM) and multilevel fast multipole method results obtained using field calculations involving bodies of arbitrary shape (FEKO) commercial electromagnetic simulation software for validation.

I. Introduction

Over the last few decades, efficient and accurate prediction of radar cross section (RCS) of objects has remained as a challenging problem due to geometrical complexity and electrical largeness of objects at increasing radar frequencies. RCS prediction at design stage is important to be able to generate databases for target identification, reduce scattered fields, and avoid costly and hard-to-conduct measurements.