A Reformulation of the Surface Field Integral Equation

Abstract

It is shown that the standard surface integral equations for a dielectric surface naturally lead to an iterative solution which does not reduce properly when the surface becomes perfectly conducting. This means that an inconsistency is contained in such a solution which is expected to be poor for surfaces with moderate or large dielectric values. Many studies have shown that the Kirchhoff fields provide excellent initial estimates. Hence, a reformulation of the surface integral equations is carried out to permit the use of the Kirchhoff fields as the initial estimates. It is shown that the resulting iterative solution of the tangential fields reduces correctly when the surface becomes perfectly conducting. This formulation allows an analogous development of surface scattering models for dielectric surfaces as was done for perfectly conducting surfaces.