A Multiregion SIE Solution for Scattering From Hypersonic Vehicle With Plasma Sheath Based on Piecewise Homogeneous Modeling

We present a multiregion surface integral equation (MR-SIE) solution for the analysis of electromagnetic (EM) scattering from an aircraft with plasma sheath. The MR-SIE offers advantages over volume-meshed methods in terms of lower dimensionality of unknowns but requires homogeneity within each region. A flexible piecewise homogeneous modeling method based on K-means clustering is proposed, which accurately and efficiently maps the inhomogeneous plasma sheath into a multiregion model. Compared with the conventional K-means clustering method, a distance formula designed for plasma EM parameters was investigated for the partition of plasma sheath. To further prompt the convenience and efficiency of the MR-SIE solver, the discontinuous Galerkin (DG) method is used to discretize the electric and magnetic current combined field integral equations (JMCFIE) of the multiregion model. Numerical experiments demonstrate that the MR-SIE solution with the flexible piecewise homogeneous modeling exhibits accuracy and efficiency, showing good potential for fast analyzing the EM scattering characteristics of hypersonic vehicles.