Incremental length diffraction coefficients for the shadow boundary of a convex cylinder

Incremental length diffraction coefficients (ILDCs) are obtained for the shadow boundaries of perfectly electrically conducting (PEC) convex cylinders of general cross section. A two-step procedure is used. First, the nonuniform (NU) current in the vicinity of the shadow boundary is approximated using Fock (1965) functions. The product of the approximated current and the free-space Green's function is then integrated on a differential strip of the cylinder surface transverse to the shadow boundary to obtain the ILDCs. This integration is performed in closed form by employing quadratic polynomial approximations for the amplitude and unwrapped phase of the integrand. Examples are given of both the current approximations and the integration procedure. Finally, as an example, the scattered far field of a PEC sphere is obtained by adding the integral of the NU ILDCs of a circular cylinder along the shadow boundary of the sphere to the physical optics (PO) far field of the sphere. This correction to the PO field is shown to significantly improve upon the accuracy of the PO far-field approximation to the total scattered field of the sphere.