A coupled surface-volume integral equation approach for the calculation of electromagnetic scattering from composite metallic and material targets

A coupled surface-volume integral equation approach is presented for the calculation of electromagnetic scattering from conducting objects coated with materials. Free-space Green's function is used in the formulation of both integral equations. In the method of moments (MoM) solution to the integral equations, the target is discretized using triangular patches for conducting surfaces and tetrahedral cells for dielectric volume. General roof-top basis functions are used to expand the surface and volume currents, respectively. This approach is applicable to inhomogeneous material coating, and, because of the use of free-space Green's function, it can be easily accelerated using fast solvers such as the multilevel fast multipole algorithm.