Polynomial Representation of NURBS and Its Application to High Frequency Scattering Prediction

This article presents a method that uses physical optics (PO) techniques to compute the monostatic radar cross section (RCS) of electrically large conducting objects modeled by non-uniform rational B-spline (NURBS) surfaces. At the beginning, a new algorithm to convert recursive B-spline basis function into piecewise polynomials in power form is presented. Then, algorithm computes the polynomial representation of B-spline basis functions and NURBS surface geometric parameters are obtained. The PO integral over NURBS surfaces of an electrically large conducting object is used to predict the object's RCS. The NURBS surface is divided into small piecewise polynomial parametric patches by isoparametric curves, and the PO integral expression over the parametric domain of each polynomial parametric patch is reduced to an analytical expression which permits an accurate and effective computation of the PO integral by using a modified Ludwig's algorithm. The RCS of the object can be obtained by adding up the PO integral contribution of each polynomial parametric patch. The effectiveness of this method is verified by numerical examples.