Radar signature modeling for combat systems

A numerical study was conducted using Xpatch, a high-frequency signature prediction code based on the shooting and bouncing ray technique. The lessons learned apply to a large class of targets of interest for millimeter wave radar applications. We investigated the use of Xpatch for ground vehicles and generic small missile-like targets. We summarize the unclassified modeling results and computational requirements at K_a-band frequencies. The ground vehicle simulations indicate that accurate target representations are required but the results tend to overpredict the measured data. The missile target simulations indicate that Xpatch is only appropriate for smooth surfaces and it fails to capture the returns associated with small surface discontinuities.