An efficient finite element-integral equation method for electromagnetic scattering from metallic cylinders with arbitrary cross sections

An efficient finite element-integral equation method is presented for calculating scattered fields from conducting objects. By combining the integral equation solution with the finite element method, this formulation allows a finite element computational domain terminated very closely to the scatterer and thus results in the decrease of the resultant matrix size. Furthermore, we employ a new integral approach to establish the boundary condition on the finite element terminating surface. The expansion of the fields on the integration contour is not related to the fields on the terminating surface, hence we obtain an explicit expression of the boundary condition on the terminating surface. Using this explicit boundary condition with the finite element solution, our method substantially improves the computational efficiency and relaxes the computer memory requirements. Only one matrix inversion is needed through our formulation and the generation and storing of a full matrix is not necessary as compared with the conventional hybrid finite element methods. The validity and accuracy of the formulation are checked by some numerical solutions of scattering from two-dimensional metallic cylinders, which are compared with the results of other methods and/or measured data.