RADAR CROSS-SECTION COMPUTATION OF INHOMOGENEOUS SCATTERERS USING EDGE-BASED FINITE-ELEMENT METHODS IN FREQUENCY AND TIME DOMAINS

This paper presents a flexible, body-conforming finite element modelin g technique, using Whitney's edge and face basis functions, for effici ent computation of radar cross section (RCS) of inhomogeneous scattere rs, both in the frequency and time domains. The vector absorbing bound ary conditions, originally developed for a spherical absorbing boundar y, are generalized for planar and cylindrical boundaries. The computat ional resources required for the proposed frequency and time domain te chniques for RCS computation are compared with those needed in the fin ite difference time domain (FDTD) and the nonorthogonal FDTD methods. Illustrative numerical results, that demonstrate the accuracy of the t echnique, are presented.