Preliminary Benchmarking of Radar Signature Prediction Codes

A preliminary study of two newly developed radar signature prediction codes was conducted in comparison to Xpatch, a high-frequency radar signature code suite based on the shooting and bouncing ray technique. We use a canonical ground vehicle target known as SLICY for which high quality surface mesh representations could be developed. The main objective was to port the new codes to various HPC platforms and investigate their practical use for ground vehicles rather than a comprehensive benchmark study. We summarize the calculated signatures and computational requirements compared to Xpatch. The simulation results indicate some of the trade offs between computational speed and accuracy. Xpatch is ultra-fast and usually sufficient for applications which involve perfectly conducting targets, devoid of cavities and not designed for low RCS performance. Under the above mentioned circumstances numerical approaches based on rigorous solution of Maxwell’s equations normally provide only minor improvements in accuracy with an extreme computational cost penalty. When a more accurate method is desired these new codes provide a viable alternative to conventional approaches because of their reduced computational complexity and memory requirements.