A Macromodeling Approach to Efficiently Compute Scattering from Large Arrays of Complex Scatterers

Abstract: Full-wave electromagnetic simulations of electrically large arrays of complex antennas and scatterers are challenging, as they consume large amount of memory and require long CPU times. This paper presents a new reduced-order modeling technique to compute scattering and radiation from large arrays of complex scatterers and antennas. In the proposed technique, each element of the array is replaced by an equivalent electric current distribution on a fictitious closed surface enclosing the element. This equivalent electric current density is derived using the equivalence theorem and it is related to the surface currents on the scatterer by the Stratton-Chu formulation. With the proposed approach, instead of directly solving for the unknown surface current density on the scatterers, we only need to solve for the unknowns on the equivalent surface. This approach leads to a reduction in the number of unknowns and better conditioning when it is applied to problems involving complex scatterers with multiscale features. Furthermore, the proposed approach is accelerated with the adaptive integral equation method to solve large problems. As illustrated in several practical examples, the proposed method yields speed up of up to 20 times and consumes up to 12 times less memory than the standard method of moments accelerated with the adaptive integral method.