An efficient solution of scattering from thin dielectric structures by volume-surface integral equation and simplified prism vector basis functions

In this paper, a hybrid volume-surface electric field integral equation approach is developed to calculate the electromagnetic scattering from planar thin dielectric structures (dielectric materials or composite conductor-dielectric objects). The volume integral equation (VIE) is used for thin dielectric layers. To reduce the number of unknowns and accelerate the solution, the prism elements are employed and the simplified prism vector (SPV) basis functions are proposed. So the volume integral can be easily transformed into either line integral or surface integral. In addition, the surface integral equation (SIE) with RWG bases is used for modeling the conductors. The proposed method uses the less number of unknowns and time consumption compared with the traditional volume-surface integral equation (VSIE) for objects comprising planar thin dielectric. Besides, the prism mesh also leads to an attractive meshing procedure. Here, the accelerated algorithm multilevel fast multipole algorithm (MLFMA) is adopted to solve the electrically large objects. Some numerical examples show the accuracy and efficiency of presented method.