Research on Electromagnetic Scattering Characteristics of Combined Conducting and Dielectric Target Above Coastal Environment

The electromagnetic (EM) scattering characteristics of target above coastal environment are complicated due to the simultaneous existence of ground region and sea region. Nevertheless, the actual target possesses both conducting part and dielectric part. Such a composite scattering problem involves multiple media parameters and large amount of unknowns. Hence, aiming at accurately and efficiently calculating the EM scattering from combined conducting and dielectric target above coastal environment, the hybrid SIE-KA method is introduced in which single integral equation (SIE) method is utilized to reduce the number of combined target's unknowns and Kirchhoff approximation (KA) is applied to obtain induced electric and magnetic current on the surface of coastal environment. Moreover, multilevel fast multipole algorithm (MLFMA) is adopted to significantly reduce the computational cost and memory requirement. Several numerical examples demonstrate the accuracy and efficiency of the hybrid method. Finally, the EM scattering characteristics of combined conducting and dielectric target above coastal environment have been studied. The radar cross section (RCS) curves with different category of environment, polarization mode, working frequency, statistic parameters of coastal environment, permittivity of target's dielectric part, target's height and target category have been analyzed in detail to provide some useful conclusions. The approach and results can be broadly applied in remote sensing simulation of coastal environment with combined target.