Application of the physical optics method to estimate the RCS of a fixed-wing UAV

Abstract

This paper presents a study on the development of a computational model for the radar cross-section (RCS) of a fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) based on a three-dimensional triangular-mesh representation and the Physical Optics (PO) approximation. The monostatic scattering problem is formulated as a surface integral and discretized over triangular facets of the UAV geometry. The computational algorithm is optimized for parallel processing to reduce computational time across a wide angular domain. The RCS results in both vertical and horizontal planes are presented in polar plots and analyzed in terms of directional scattering characteristics. The results show that the PO model enables rapid estimation of the RCS distribution of fixed-wing UAVs during the preliminary design stage.