A Shooting and Bouncing Ray Method Combined with Equivalent Aperture Sources for Antenna Far-Field Prediction

This paper proposes a Shooting and Bouncing Ray Method(SBR) combined with Equivalent Aperture Sources (EA-SBR) to address the challenge of antenna far-field radiation calculations in electrically large and complex environments. The method utilizes the Geometrical Optics (GO) approach to trace rays and creates virtual equivalent aperture sources at object reflection points. By iterating the fields using the GO method, the incident fields for all equivalent aperture sources are obtained, and the contributions of these sources to the secondary radiation fields of the antenna are calculated. Comparisons with the Method of Moments/Multilevel Fast Multipole Method (MoM/MLFMM) and Ray Launching Geometrical Optics (RL-GO) in the commercial electromagnetic software FEKO validate the reliability and accuracy of the EA-SBR method. Compared to full-wave methods, EA-SBR offers significant advantages in computation time and memory usage. Furthermore, compared to traditional high-frequency algorithms, EA-SBR achieves substantial improvements in computational efficiency with minimal memory requirements.