Including multibounce effects in the moment‐method physical‐optics (MMPO) method

The hybrid moment-method physical-optics (MM–PO) approach has been shown to be an efficient and accurate tool to model the electromagnetic behavior of antennas installed onboard. In this paper, we present a significant improvement, based on replacing the PO solution with an iterative solution of the magnetic-field integral equation (MFIE), which allows including multibounce effects in the PO region. Thus, the so-called moment-method iterative-physical-optics (MM–IPO) method provides significant improvements with respect to the previous MM–PO, mainly when complex geometries with multiple interaction effects are of interest. Some numerical results are presented and compared with a reference MM solution in order to illustrate the accuracy and efficiency of the proposed approach. © 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Microwave Opt Technol Lett 32: 435–439, 2002.