Efficient analysis of thick curved metal sheets

The scattering analysis of perfectly conducting plates with the method-of-moment discretization of the Electric-Field Integral Equation has been traditionally carried out according to the thin-sheet approximation, which neglects the current contributions over the plate rims. The plate is then modelled as an open surface and handles a restricted number of unknowns as compared with the canonical modelling as a closed object. The thin-sheet approximation, although used in many practical applications, becomes inaccurate for thick enough plates or plates under plane wave incidence at grazing angles. Recently, a thick-plate approach has been presented to address the time-efficient and accurate scattering analysis of thick plates. This scheme exploits the symmetry properties of fields and currents thereby giving rise to two uncoupled problems with roughly half the number of unknowns of the original problem. In this paper, we extend this thick-plate scheme to the efficient scattering analysis of thick curved sheets.