High-frequency backscatter from a finned cylinder at grazing incidence--Comparison of two theoretical methods

A closed-form, high-frequency approximation is obtained for the diffracted-reflected-diffracted field contribution to the backscattered field resulting from the grazing illumination of a perfectly conducting, infinitely long, finned cylinder by a normally incident cylindrical transverse magnetic (TM) wave. The result, which is valid for any relative magnitudes of the cylinder radius and the fin width provided both of them are electrically large, is derived by two different methods. One of them is the radiation integral method related to the physical theory of diffraction. The other is the complex ray tracing method related to the spectral theory of diffraction (STD). Relative merits and disadvantages of the two methods are pointed out.