BVH-Accelerated Ray Tracing for High-Frequency Electromagnetic Backscattering
This addresses computational bottlenecks in electromagnetics for radar cross-section prediction, but it is incremental as it builds on existing ray tracing and physical optics techniques.
The authors tackled the computational infeasibility of full-wave solvers for high-frequency electromagnetic backscattering by presenting a shooting and bouncing rays method, achieving efficient modeling with validation against analytical solutions and application to complex geometries like an aircraft.
As computational complexity in electromagnetics increases with frequency, full-wave solvers become computationally infeasible for electrically large problems. To address this limitation, we present a shooting and bouncing rays (SBR) method for efficiently modeling electromagnetic backscattering of metallic objects in the high-frequency regime. The method couples multi-reflection geometrical-optics ray transport with a physical optics surface integral discretized over ray tubes. To reduce the massive ray-surface intersection search space, we use a bounding volume hierarchy (BVH) and organize the computation as a trace-integrate pipeline. The ray tracing generates hit data, and the physical optics integral is evaluated over valid intersections only. Numerical accuracy is controlled through an incident-ray sampling rule that mitigates phase aliasing in the discretized physical optics integration. The method is accelerated on NVIDIA and AMD GPUs and parallelized with MPI. We validate against analytical Mie solutions for a perfectly electrically conducting (PEC) sphere and demonstrate applicability to a complex aircraft geometry for monostatic radar cross-section prediction.