Electromagnetic scattering and radiation of arbitrarily-shaped surfaces by triangular patch modeling

Numerical methods were developed to treat both electrostatic and electrodynamic problems involving arbitrarily shaped conducting bodies. The bodies were modeled by planar triangular patches, chosen because of their ability to conform easily to any geometrical surface or boundary. A piecewise constant charge representation was used in the method of moments to develop a simple and efficient numerical procedure for determining the static charge distribution on arbitrarily shaped bodies. A set of basis functions for surface current having this same charge representation was also introduced and used in the solution of the electrodynamic scattering and radiation problems. These basis functions, which were defined on pairs of adjacent triangular patches and were free of line or point charges on subdomain boundaries, were crucial to the development of numerical solution procedures for the electric field integral equation in both the frequency and time domains. They were also used to develop a numerical solution of the frequency domain magnetic field integral equation.