An Improved RCS Calculation Method for Power Lines Combining Characteristic Mode with SMWA.

The radar cross-section (RCS) of power lines has an important significance for detection of the power lines. The method of moments (MoM) can calculate the RCS of power lines. However, the efficiency of the MoM is limited by the time-consuming computing process, as well as the expensive storage overhead. In order to enhance the efficiency and reduce the storage of the RCS calculation of power lines, we propose an RCS calculation method that combines the characteristic mode (CM) with a Sherman–Morrison–Woodbury formula-based algorithm (SMWA), which is referred to as a CM-SMWA. CMs are used as the basis functions for reducing the dimension of the MoM impedance matrix, and the SMWA is applied to directly solve the CMs-reduced matrix equation, which can reduce the computational time and storage. The numerical results demonstrate that the proposed method can obtain the RCS of power lines, with different incident angles and different polarizations, at a higher efficiency. At 35 GHz, compared with the conventional MoM, for a typical LGJ50-8 power line with a length of 0.276 m, the computation time is reduced by 62.4% and the memory occupation is reduced by 96.4%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]