New plane wave spectrum formulations for the near-fields of circular and strip apertures

The plane wave spectrum (PWS) method has previously been applied to analyze the near-field of planar apertures. The main goal of this paper is to present new PWS formulations for the near-fields of strip and circular apertures. Only special cases are developed in detail. For example, the uniform and parabolic aperture distributions are developed for the circular aperture. These new formulations are expressed in terms of either elementary functions or Fresnel integrals. Consequently, they permit considerably more rapid and efficient calculations than previous near-field formulations, by either the PWS or the aperture integration approach. The new formulations are especially advantageous for large circularly symmetric apertures (on the order of and larger) in that computational efficiencies are improved by an order of magnitude or two over the original PWS formulation. The improvement over aperture integration techniques is more than a factor of 1000 for the aperture.