Heuristic Incremental Theory of Diffraction for a Wedge with Impedance Surfaces

This paper proposes a novel incremental theory of diffraction (ITD) formulation to calculate the fringe field from a wedge characterized by impedance surfaces and arbitrary exterior angles. The ITD formula was originally based on the Fourier transform pair relationship between the solution for the canonical wedge problem and incremental field contribution. However, this procedure can be utilized to report the ITD formula only for planar and half-planar impedance surfaces. Therefore, this paper develops a heuristic ITD formula by conceptually deriving the incremental diffracted field contribution from the uniform theory of diffraction coefficient and inferring the physical optics edge-diffracted field contribution from the terms related to the incidence shadow and reflection shadow boundaries. The proposed formula is applied to simple triangular impedance cylinder and disk models with impedance surfaces, and the results are compared with those of the method-of-moment and VIRAF’s ITD solver to show that is performs similar to the former and better than the latter.