Efficient Solution of Scattering From Composite Planar Thin Dielectric-Conductor Objects by Volume-Surface Integral Equation and Simplified Prism Vector Basis Functions

Scattering from composite planar thin dielectric-conductor objects is calculated by the hybrid volume-surface integral equation (VSIE) approach. To highly efficient model such objects, the prism elements are used for volume regions instead of general tetrahedral elements, and the simplified prism vector basis functions are proposed so that the volume integral can be simplified into either surface integral or line integral. As a pair, the RWG basis is used for arbitrarily shaped conductor surface. This proposed method has several advantages for objects comprising planar thin dielectric materials. First of all, the use of prism elements can significantly reduce the number of unknowns compared with the general tetrahedral mesh scheme so that the CPU time consumption and memory occupation are reduced. In addition, the prism elements also result in a more convenient meshing procedure. Finally, the simplification of volume integral further reduces the CPU time consumption, while maintaining comparable accuracy. Since the proposed scheme can be easily accelerated by fast algorithms, our VSIE method combined with the multilevel fast multipole algorithm is employed for the scattering analysis from the electrically large objects. Several numerical results are reported to show the good accuracy and efficiency of the proposed method.