Versatile and Accurate Schemes of Discretization in the Scattering Analysis of 2-D Composite Objects With Penetrable or Perfectly Conducting Regions

The method-of-moment discretization of boundary integral equations in the scattering analysis of closed infinitely long (2-D) objects, perfectly conducting (PEC) or penetrable, is traditionally carried out with continuous piecewise linear basis functions, which embrace pairs of adjacent segments. This is numerically advantageous because the discretization of the transversal component of the scattered fields, electric (TE) or magnetic (TM), becomes free from hypersingular Kernel contributions. In the analysis of composite objects, though, the imposition of the continuity requirement around junction nodes, where the boundaries of several regions intersect, becomes especially awkward. In this paper, we present, for the scattering analysis of composite objects, a new combined discretization of the Poggio-Miller-Chang-Harrington-Wu-Tsai (PMCHWT) integral equation, for homogeneous dielectric regions, and the electric-field integral equation, for PEC regions, such that the basis functions are defined strictly on each segment, with no continuity constraint between adjacent segments. We show the improved observed accuracy with the proposed TE-PMCHWT implementation on several dielectric objects with sharp edges and corners and moderate or high contrasts. Furthermore, we illustrate the versatility of these schemes in the analysis of 2-D composite piecewise homogeneous objects without sacrificing accuracy with respect to the conventional implementations.