Comparison of bistatic signatures of octahedral and icosahedral reflectors in high-frequency domain

Abstract

In this paper, the bistatic polarimetric signatures of perfectly conducting octahedral and icosahedral reflectors with high dimensions with respect to the wavelength, are considered. A closed form solution for their fast computation is developed and results are compared. These particular faceted polyhedra, both composed by several identical elementary reflectors, should exhibit a large bistatic and monostatic radar cross section (RCS) over a wide angular range. The proposed method is based on coherent summations of the asymptotic solution of the trihedral corner reflector (TCR): the elementary reflector, evaluated for any incidence and observation angles. This can be done with the help of geometrical optics (GO) to take into account shadowing effects. physical optics (PO) and GO are used to derive the contribution of the TCRs in single, double and triple reflections. First order diffractions are also included in the analysis with the help of method of equivalent currents/incremental length diffraction coefficients (MEC/ILDC).