Methods in wave propagation and scattering

Abstract

Aspects of wave propagation and scattering with an emphasis on specific applications in engineering and physics are examined. Frequency-domain methods prevail. Both forward and inverse problems are considered. Typical applications of the method of moments to rough surface three-dimensional (3-D) electromagnetic scattering require a truncation of the surface considered and call for a tapered incident wave. It is shown how such wave can be constructed as a superposition of plane waves, avoiding problems near both normal and grazing incidence and providing clean footprints and clear polarization at all angles of incidence. The proposed special choice of polarization vectors removes an irregularity at the origin of the wavenumber space and leads to a wave that is optimal in a least squared error sense. Issues in the application to 3-D scattering from an object over a rough surface are discussed. Approximate 3-D scalar and vector tapered waves are derived which can be evaluated without resorting to any numerical integrations. Important limitations to the accuracy and applicability of these approximations are pointed out. An analytical solution is presented for the electromagnetic induction problem of magnetic diffusion into and scattering from a permeable, highly but not perfectly conducting prolate spheroid under axial excitation, expressed in terms of an infinite matrix equation. The spheroid is assumed to be embedded in a homogeneous non-conducting medium as appropriate for low-frequency, high-contrast scattering governed by magnetoquasistatics. The solution is based on separation of variables and matching boundary conditions where the prolate spheroidal wavefunctions with complex wavenumber parameter are expanded in terms of spherical harmonics. For small skin depths, an approximate solution is constructed, which avoids any reference to the spheroidal wavefunctions. The problem of long spheroids and long circular cylinders is solved by using an infinite cylinder approximation. In some cases, our ability to evaluate the spheroidal wavefunctions breaks down at intermediate frequencies. To deal with this, a general broadband rational function approximation technique is developed and demonstrated. We treat special cases and provide numerical reference data for the induced magnetic dipole moment or, equivalently, the magnetic polarizability factor. The magnetoquasistatic response of a distribution of an arbitrary number of interacting small conducting and permeable objects is also investigated. Useful formulations are provided for expressing the magnetic dipole moment of conducting and permeable objects of general shape. An alternative to Tikhonov regularization for deblurring and inverse diffraction, based on a local extrapolation scheme, is described, analyzed, and illustrated numerically for the cases of continuation of fields obeying Laplace and Helmholtz equations. At the outset of the development, a special deconvolution problem, where a parameter describes the degree of additive blurring, is considered. No a priori knowledge on the unblurred data is assumed. A standard solution based on an output least squares formulation includes a regularization parameter into a linear, shift-invariant filter. The proposed alternative approach takes advantage of the analyticity of the smoothing process with respect to the blurring parameter. Here a simple local extrapolation scheme is employed. The problem is encountered in applications involving potential theories dealing with magnetostatics, electrostatics, and gravity data. As a generalization to the dynamic case, inverse diffraction of scalar waves is considered. Examples are presented and the two methods compared numerically. The problem of inferring unknown geometry and material parameters of a waveguide model from noisy samples of the associated modal dispersion curves is considered. In a significant reduction of the complexity of a common inversion methodology, the inner of two nested iterations is eliminated: The approach described does not employ explicit fitting of the data to computed dispersion curves. Instead, the unknown parameters are adjusted to minimize a cost function derived directly from the determinant of the boundary condition system matrix. This results in a very efficient inversion scheme that, in the case of noise-free data, yields exact results. Multi-mode data can be simultaneously processed without extra complications. Furthermore, the inversion scheme can accommodate an arbitrary number of unknown parameters, provided that the data have sufficient sensitivity to these parameters. As an important application, the sonic guidance condition for a fluid-filled borehole in an elastic, homogeneous, and isotropic rock formation is considered for numerical forward and inverse dispersion analysis. The parametric inversion with uncertain model parameters and the influence of bandwidth and noise are investigated numerically. The cases of multi-frequency and multi-mode data are examined. Finally, the borehole leaky-wave modes are classified according to the location of the roots of the characteristic equation on a multi-sheeted Riemann surface. A comprehensive set of dipole leaky-wave modal dispersions is computed. In an independent numerical experiment the excitation of some of these modes is demonstrated. The utilization of leaky-wave dispersion data for inversion is discussed.