A multiple-patch phase space method for computing trajectories on manifolds with applications to wave propagation problems

Abstract

This thesis concerns the numerical simulation of creeping rays and their contribution to high frequency scattering problems. Creeping rays are a type of diffracted rays which are generated at the shadow line of the scatterer and propagate along geodesic paths on the scatterer surface. On a perfectly conducting convex body, they attenuate along their propagation path by tangentially shedding diffracted rays and losing energy. On a concave scatterer, they propagate on the surface and importantly, in the absence of dissipation, experience no attenuation. The study of creeping rays is important in many high frequency problems, such as design of sophisticated and conformal antennas, antenna coupling problems, radar cross section (RCS) computations and control of scattering properties of metallic structures coated with dielectric materials. First, assuming the scatterer surface can be represented by a single parameterization, we propose a new Eulerian formulation for the ray propagation problem by deriving a set of escape partial differential equations in a three-dimensional phase space. The equations are solved on a fixed computational grid using a version of fast marching algorithm. The solution to the equations contain information about all possible creeping rays. This information includes the phase and amplitude of the ray field, which are extracted by a fast post-processing. The advantage of this formulation over the standard Eulerian formulation is that we can compute multivalued solutions corresponding to crossing rays. Moreover, we are able to control the accuracy everywhere on the scatterer surface and suppress the problems with the traditional Lagrangian formulation. To compute all possible creeping rays corresponding to all shadow lines, the algorithm is of computational order O(N3 log N), with N3 being the total number of grid points in the computational phase space domain. This is expensive for computing the wave field for only one shadow line, but if the solutions are sought for many shadow lines (for many illumination angles), the phase space method is more efficient than the standard methods such as ray tracing and methods based on the eikonal equation. Next, we present a modification of the single-patch phase space method to a multiple-patch scheme in order to handle realistic problems containing scatterers with complicated geometries. In such problems, the surface is split into multiple patches where each patch has a well-defined parameterization. The escape equations are solved in each patch, individually. The creeping rays on the scatterer are then computed by connecting all individual solutions through a fast post-processing. We consider an application to mono-static radar cross section problems where creeping rays from all illumination angles must be computed. The numerical results of the fast phase space method are presented.