The application of the conjugate gradient method for the solution of electromagnetic scattering from arbitrarily oriented wire antennas

The method of conjugate gradients is applied to the analysis of radiation from thin-wire antennas. With this iterative technique, it is possible to solve electrically large arbitrarily oriented wire structures without storing any matrices as is conventionally done in the method of moments. The basic difference between the proposed method and Galerkin's method, for the same expansion functions, is that for the iterative technique we are solving a least squares problem. Hence, as the order of the approximation is increased, the proposed technique guarantees a monotonic decrease of the least squared error (
\parallel AI - Y\parallel^{2}
), whereas Galerkin's method does not. Even though the method converges for any initial guess, a good one may significantly reduce the time of computation. Also, explicit error formulas are given for the rate of convergence of this method. Hence, any problem can be solved to a prespecified degree of accuracy. It is shown that the method has the advantage of a direct solution as the final solution is obtained in a finite number of steps. The method is also suitable for solving singular operator equations in which case the method monotonically converges to the least squares solution with minimum norm. Numerical results are presented for the thin-wire antennas and are compared with the solution obtained by the method of moments.