The multilevel fast physical optics method for calculating high frequency scattered fields

The multilevel fast physical optics (MLFPO) is proposed to accelerate the computation of the fields scattered from electrically large coated scatterers. This method is based on the quadratic patch subdivision and the multilevel technology. First, the quadratic patches are employed rather than the planar patches to discretize the considered scatterer. Hence, the number of the contributing patches is cut dramatically, thus making the workload of the MLFPO method much lower than that of the traditional Gordon’s method. Next, the multilevel technology is introduced in this work to avoid calculating the physical optics scattered fields from the considered scatterer directly, so that the proposed algorithm can significantly reduce the computational complexity. Finally, numerical results have demonstrated the accuracy and efficiency of the MLFPO method based on the quadratic patches.