Fast Analysis of Electromagnetic Scattering From Conducting Objects Buried Under a Lossy Ground

Abstract

Electromagnetic scattering from conducting objects is investigated for the applications of underground detection. The air–soil composite is modeled by a classical half space where the dyadic Green's function can be defined and formulated. The electric field integral equation (EFIE) is employed to guarantee the accuracy and robustness of the analysis for arbitrarily shaped scatterers. The internal resonance of EFIE is first studied under typical working conditions (frequencies, soil water contents, etc.). It is shown that this spurious resonance is much alleviated due to loss of the soil. Next, the unbounded and ill-posed spectrum of the EFIE operator is remedied by a novel localized half-space Calderon preconditioner by further exploring the lossy nature of the background. Such preconditioning is extremely useful for objects containing multiscale features. Finally, the half-space multilevel fast multipole algorithm based on real-image approximation is adopted to accelerate the computation for electrically large scatterers. Several examples in the applications of subsurface sensing are demonstrated to validate the efficiency and accuracy of this method.