Improved electric field integral equation (IEFIE) for analysis of scattering from 3-D conducting structures

In this paper, a novel improved electric field integral equation (IEFIE) is developed to achieve fast and accurate solution of electromagnetic scattering from 3-D conducting structures. By adding the principle value term of the magnetic field integral equation (MFIE) operator into the EFIE operator, a well-conditioned improved EFIE operator is constructed. To achieve a reasonable accuracy, several update steps for the current vector are required. A multilevel fast multipole algorithm (MLFMA) is also applied to accelerate the computation of matrix-vector multiplications in the iteration. The present method attains much faster convergence of iterations than traditional EFIE and much better accuracy of the solution than the traditional combined field integral equation, particularly for 3-D structures with open or sharp surfaces. Numerical results show the validity and efficiency of the present method.