A Bistatic Scattering Evaluation Method of the Chaff Cloud in Airflow Based on VRT

Abstract

The electromagnetic (EM) scattering properties of the chaff cloud in airflow are rarely addressed in previous works. To deal with this issue, two types of the chaff clouds in airflow are first established based on aerodynamics theories. Then, the K-means algorithm is utilized to divide the chaff cloud into several parts according to the elements’ number density. Meanwhile, the EM transmission property of each part is extracted with the help of the method-of-moments (MoM). Based on this, the vector radiative transfer (VRT) method is introduced to estimate the bistatic scattering coefficients of the established chaff clouds with 40 million elements, which takes into account the radiation pattern of the transmitting antenna and the EM coupling between chaff elements. To speed up the VRT program, parallel computing technologies are adopted. Besides, the verifications of the VRT method are proposed by performing simulations with a numerical method and conducting experiments. Comparative investigations indicate that the results predicted by the proposed VRT method have a good agreement with experimental ones with an error of less than 10%.