Determination of specular points on a surface of revolution

For a given source and observation point, specular points on a conducting surface must be found in order to apply the geometrical optics theory to calculate the reflected field. An efficient method is presented for finding all the specular points for the special case in which the conducting surface is a part of a surface of revolution. Our method, which reduces the conventional two-dimensional search to a one-dimensional search, results in a significant savings in computer time. A one-dimensional search also makes it economically feasible to obtain a global solution for certain classes of surface, source, and observation point geometries that do not render solutions in the more conventional two-dimensional searches.