Volume Integral Equation Analysis of Thin Dielectric Sheet Using Sinusoidal Macro-Basis Functions

In this letter, we present an improvement over the conventional thin dielectric sheet (TDS) formulation for the analysis of thin dielectric sheets. Our focus is to address the problem of scattering from thin penetrable scatterers by developing a volumetric formulation based on the use of macro-basis functions. The electric fields produced by the source basis functions are derived directly, bypassing the summation of scalar and vector potentials. The latter results in a considerable time advantage in comparison to the conventional method of moments (MoM) solution of the volume electric field integral equation (V-EFIE), while the accuracy remains comparable. In contrast to the TDS formulation, both tangential and normal currents are employed so that problems with high and low permittivity, as well as those involving grazing incident angles, can be accurately analyzed. Several examples are reported that show excellent agreement with conventional techniques and demonstrate the effectiveness of the new approach.