An FDTD/MoM hybrid technique for modeling complex antennas in the presence of heterogeneous grounds

Calculating the current distribution and radiation patterns for ground-penetrating radar antennas is a challenging problem because of the complex interaction between the antenna, the ground, and any buried scatterer. Typically, numerical techniques that are well suited for modeling the antennas themselves are not well suited for modeling the heterogeneous grounds, and visa versa. For example the finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) technique is well suited for modeling fields in heterogeneous media, whereas the method of moments (MoM) is well suited for modeling complex antennas in free space. This paper describes a hybrid technique, based upon the equivalence principle, for calculating an antenna’s current distribution radiation pattern when the antenna is located near an air-ground interface. The original problem is decomposed into two coupled equivalent problems: one for the antenna geometry and the other for the ground geometry, with field information passing between them via a rapidly converging iterative procedure. The fields in each region may be modeled using numerical techniques best suited to them. Results for several test cases are presented, using FDTD to model the ground problem and MoM for the antenna problem, that demonstrate the accuracy of this hybrid technique.