A Novel Parallel Parabolic Equation Method for Electromagnetic Scatterings

The alternating group explicit (AGE) scheme, together with the alternating direction implicit (ADI) scheme, is used for the parabolic equation (PE) method to analyze the electromagnetic scattering from electrically large conducting targets. The calculation can be taken plane by plane by using the finite difference scheme along the paraxial direction. Furthermore, each transverse plane is divided into two regions, which are a small region around the target and an outer region combined with the air layer and a perfect matching layer. The ADI scheme is applied to the small region, whereas the AGE scheme is introduced to the outer region. In this manner, only a few matrix equations are needed to be solved for the small region and the unknowns of the outer region can be directly obtained without solving any matrix equations. Therefore, the CPU time can be reduced significantly by the proposed method and it can be easily adapted to the parallel technology. The numerical results verify the accuracy and efficiency of the proposed method compared with the Crank-Nicolson-based PE method and the ADI-based PE method. Moreover, the parallel efficiency is given as the last numerical example.