A new bistatic model for electromagnetic scattering from perfectly conducting random surfaces: numerical evaluation and comparison with SPM

Abstract

This paper is a companion to our previous contribution deriving a new approximate bistatic model for electromagnetic scattering from perfectly conducting rough surfaces. We evaluate this model numerically and compare it with an ‘exact’ numerical solution of the scattering problem. This comparison shows good agreement between our approximation and numerical solution for a wide range of incident and scattering angles. However, for horizontal-incident horizontal-scattered polarization (HH-pol), the model exhibits strong deviation from the ‘exact’ solution for near-grazing scattering angles. The model shows a similar divergence at HH-pol when compared with the small-perturbation method (SPM). The cause of this divergence is explained. During the SPM comparison, we noticed that the integral equation method model also does not reproduce the SPM limit except for forward and backscatter geometries. We propose in this paper a simple modification of our model to ensure agreement with the bistatic SPM approximation when applicable, and show that the modified model also yields close agreement with numerical computations even when the surface roughness does not satisfy the SPM condition.