Application of physical optics to the RCS computation of bodies modeled with NURBS surfaces

The paper presents a method for the computation of the monostatic radar cross section (RCS) of electrically large conducting objects modeled by nonuniform rational B-spline (NURBS) surfaces using the physical optic (PO) technique. The NURBS surfaces are expanded in terms of rational Bezier patches by applying the Cox-De Boor transform algorithm. This transformation is justified because Bezier patches are numerically more stable than NURBS surfaces. The PO integral is evaluated over the parametric space of the Bezier surfaces using asymptotic integration. The scattering field contribution of each Bezier patch is expressed in terms of its geometric parameters. Excellent agreement with PO predictions is obtained. The method is quite efficient because it makes use of a small number of patches to model complex bodies, so it requires very little memory and computing time