An improved physical optics method for the computation of radar cross section of electrically large objects

An improved physical optics method for the computation of radar cross section of electrically large objects is presented. The method is quite general to compute the radar cross section (RCS) of arbitrarily shaped metal structures by rigorously transforming the radiation surface integral in the traditional PO method to a line integral along the metal boundary. Since the line integral is used in this method, the computation time can be reduced in comparison with the traditional PO method. The traditional PO method and the proposed method are compared by computing the RCS of a square plate and a triangular plate. It is confirmed that these two methods are similar in accuracy. Finally, an example of application to a 3-D body is demonstrated.