Transient scattering from arbitrary conducting surfaces by iterative solution of the electric field integral equation

Abstract

This paper presents a numerical time-marching solution of the electric field integral equation (EFIE) suitable for simulation of transient scattering and radiation from perfectly conducting three-dimensional surfaces in a lossless isotropic medium. The method is capable of treating metallic scatterers of arbitrary shape modeled by arbitrary polygonal patches. Backscattering results for scatterers under an arbitrary time-dependent electromagnetic excitation may be obtained provided the tangential electric fields incident on the scatterer surface are known. By applying an expanded form of the EFIE free of spatial derivatives to simple piecewise-constant patch basis functions on polygonal surface patches, analytical simplifications then facilitate an iterative solution technique producing results free of numerical instabilities. Both near- and far-field transient scattering and radiation results can be obtained using this method.