Shadow boundary incremental length diffraction coefficients applied to scattering from 3-D bodies

Shadow boundary incremental length diffraction coefficients (SBILDCs) are h igh-frequency fields designed to correct the physical optics (PO) field of a three-dimensional (3-D) perfectly electrically conducting scatterer. The SBILDCs are integrated along the shadow boundary of the 3-D object to appro ximate the field radiated by the nonuniform shadow boundary current (the di fference between the exact and PO currents near the shadow boundary), This integral is added to the PO field to give an approximation to the exact sca ttered field that takes into account both PO and nonuniform shadow boundary currents on the scatterer. Like other incremental length diffraction coeff icients, any SBILDC is based on the use of a 2-D canonical scatterer to loc ally approximate the surface of the 3-D scatterer to which it is applied. C ircular cylinder SBILDCs are, to date, the only SBILDCs that have been obta ined in closed form. In this paper, these closed-form expressions are valid ated by applying them for the first time to a 3-D scatterer with varying ra dius of curvature-the prolate spheroid. The results obtained clearly demons trate that for bistatic scattering the combined PO-SBILDC approximation is considerably more accurate than the PO held approximation alone.