Refined Ray Tracing Inside Single- and Double-Curvatured Concave Surfaces

Abstract

Analytical surface modeling is a priori requirement for electromagnetic (EM) analysis over aerospace platforms. Although numerically specified surfaces and even non-uniform rational basis spline (NURBS) can be used for modeling such surfaces, for most practical EM applications, it is sufficient to model them as quadric surface patches and the hybrids thereof. It is therefore apparent that a vast majority of aerospace bodies can be conveniently modeled as combinations of simpler quadric surfaces, i.e., hybrid of quadric cylinders and quadric surfaces of revolutions. Hence the analysis of geometric ray tracing inside is prerequisite to analyzing the RF build-up. This book describes the ray tracing effects inside different quadric surfaces such as right circular cylinder, general paraboloid of revolution (GPOR), GPOR frustum of different shaping parameters, and the corresponding visualization of the ray-path details. Finally ray tracing inside a typical space module, which is a hybrid of a finite segment of right circular cylinder and a frustum of GPOR is analyzed for practical aerospace applications.