Improvement of Iterative Physical Optics using Previous Information to Guide Initial Guess

Abstract

We propose an improved method of iterative physical optics (IPO) to analyze electromagnetic scattering by open-ended cavities. The traditional IPO method uses a fixed number of iterations; if this number is too small, the accuracy of the estimated monostatic radar cross section (RCS) of open-ended cavities degrades as the incident angle of the incident field increases. The recently-introduced adaptive iterative physical optics-change rate (AIPO-CR) method uses a variable number of iterations; compared to the IPO method, it predicts monostatic RCS more accurately, but requires more computation time. In this paper, a new algorithm is devised to improve both the monostatic RCS prediction accuracy of the IPO method, and the computational efficiency of the AIPO-CR method. The proposed method, iterative physical optics-retained previous solution (IPO-RPS), calculates the currents at one incident angle, then reuses them as the initial currents of iterations for the next incident angle. In simulations of the monostatic RCS for various open-ended cavities, the IPO-RPS method was more accurate than the traditional IPO method, and computationally more efficient than both the IPO and AIPO-CR methods.