Roughness Impact on the RCS of Simple Canonical Objects in the Terahertz Regime

Abstract

The higher the frequency is, the greater the influence of the precision and the realism of the CAD models on electromagnetic (EM) scattering characteristics are. In the terahertz (THz) regime, surfaces of most objects can't be taken as smooth according to Rayleigh criterion. The interaction of EM waves and the surface presents a coherent part in the specular direction and a scattering part in the other directions. Unfortunately, the roughness of surface can't be represented by the CAD geometry. Based on statistics theory, the rough surface height profile is fully determined by the height probability density function (pdf) and its autocorrelation functions. Without loss of generality, the height pdf of surface is assumed to be Gaussian. Under the assumption, the random Gaussian rough surface is correspondingly generated. The original CAD geometry and the random Gaussian rough surface are superposed as the input of EM computation. To demonstrate the roughness impact on RCS, EM scattering characteristics of simple canonical obj ects such as plate and dihedral in the THz regime are investigated. Taking into account the statistical surface roughness, the ray-based high-frequency EM method, shooting and bouncing rays (SBR), is utilized to compute the RCS of the objects above in the THz regime. Furthermore, the inverse synthetic aperture radar (ISAR) images are also carried out via filtered back proj ection (FBP) method. The EM scattering characteristics of the objects above in the THz regime are analyzed. Great differences of the objects EM scattering characteristics between the smooth and rough ones are observed and discussed.