Including multibounce effects in the moment-method physical-optics (MMPO) method

The hybrid moment-method physical-optics (MM-PO) approach has been shown to be an efficient and accurate tool to model the electromagnetic behavior of antennas installed onboard. In this paper, we present a significant improvement, based on replacing the PO solution with an iterative solution of the magnetic-field integral equation (MFIE), which allows including multibounce effects in the PO region. Thus, the so-called moment-method iterative-physical-optics (MM-IPO) method provides significant improvements with respect to the previous MM-PO, mainly when complex geometries with multiple interaction effects are of interest. Some numerical results are presented and compared with a reference MM solution in order to illustrate the accuracy and efficiency of the proposed approach. (C) 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.