Fast analysis of wide-band scattering from electrically large targets with time-domain parabolic equation method

An efficient three-dimensional time domain parabolic equation (TDPE) method is proposed to fast analyze the narrow-angle wideband EM scattering properties of electrically large targets. The finite difference (FD) of Crank-Nicolson (CN) scheme is used as the traditional tool to solve the time-domain parabolic equation. However, a huge computational resource is required when the meshes become dense. Therefore, the alternating direction implicit (ADI) scheme is introduced to discretize the time-domain parabolic equation. In this way, the reduced transient scattered fields can be calculated line by line in each transverse plane for any time step with unconditional stability. As a result, less computational resources are required for the proposed ADI-based TDPE method when compared with both the traditional CN-based TDPE method and the finite-different time-domain (FDTD) method. By employing the rotating TDPE method, the complete bistatic RCS can be obtained with encouraging accuracy for any observed angle. Numerical examples are given to demonstrate the accuracy and efficiency of the proposed method. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.