A Shooting and Bouncing Ray (SBR) Modeling Framework Involving Dielectrics and Perfect Conductors

A parallel computing architecture based on NVIDIA's compute unified device architecture (CUDA) for the modeling of electromagnetic wave propagation by means of the high-frequency approximation method, shooting and bouncing rays (SBRs), is introduced and evaluated. The algorithm provides a reliable treatment of problems involving bulky and nonperfectly conducting materials. The general case of wave propagation through arbitrary dielectric materials also considering evanescent waves is presented in a concise way and a simplified treatment of the practically important case of thin dielectric layers over perfectly electrically conducting (PEC) bodies is considered. The resulting hybrid SBR approach is capable of dealing with PEC and the various dielectric object cases in a unified manner. A wide variety of scattering problems is considered, and scattered field predictions are compared to exact method of moments (MoM) and finite-element method (FEM) results. In particular, the benefits of the SBR within bulky dielectrics are highlighted.