Shadow Radiation Iterative Physical Optics Method for High-Frequency Scattering

A shadow-radiation-based fast iterative physical optics (IPO) scheme, for the analysis of the scattering from large complex geometries involving multiple reflection and occlusion effects, is proposed. By employing a “shadow-radiation” mechanism, the scheme alleviates the need for expensive computation and storage of a geometric visibility function. In a nested fashion, shadow radiation iterations are performed for each “bounce” in the conventional multiple reflection IPO scheme. The resulting method makes use of simple field integrals which are all accelerable using a multilevel nonuniform grid-based field evaluation algorithm, with a modification tailored to the scheme's integral kernels. The proposed scheme is also shown analytically to be a more stable (faster converging) equivalent of existing IPO schemes. The method is studied in terms of accuracy and performance for representative examples and compared with alternative physical optics and numerically exact solution techniques.