Simulation and Analysis of Electromagnetic Scattering from Anisotropic Plasma-Coated Electrically Large and Complex Targets

Abstract

An efficient physical optics (PO) calculation method is proposed for the electromagnetic (EM) scattering of electrically large targets coated with magnetized plasma characterized by asymmetric tensor dielectric parameters. The outer surface of the arbitrarily shaped target is discretized into triangular elements. According to the principle of tangent plane approximation and by using the plane wave spectrum expansion method, the scattered field from one triangular element is derived as a double integral in the spectral domain. To obtain the solution in the spatial domain, the saddle point method is used to asymptotically calculate the integral. Then, the equivalent surface currents (ESCs) are constructed by calculating the surface field at the outer surface of the planar model, from which the PO solution is derived by using the Stratton–Chu integral. Moreover, to interpret the field propagation process in the plasma layer quantitatively, the total scattered field of the coated planar model is decomposed into the superposition of different mode field components. It is observed that the scattered fields demonstrate an inherent cross-polarization phenomenon due to the nonreciprocal constitutive relation of the plasma, which is a distinct feature and is different from the general anisotropic medium whose dielectric parameters can be diagonalized. The effectiveness of the proposed method is verified by numerical results. Furthermore, the proposed algorithm consumes less calculation time and memory as compared to commercial full solvers.