Influence of aircraft surface distribution on electromagnetic scattering characteristics

In this paper, two typical stealth aircraft concepts (wing fuselage blended and flying-wing) were designed. Then three gradually changed surface distribution models with the same planform for each concept were created. Based on the multilevel fast multipole algorithm (MLFMA), the vertical polarization transmitting/vertical polarization receiving (VV) and horizontal polarization transmitting/horizontal polarization receiving (HH) radar cross section (RCS) characteristics were simulated with five frequencies between 0.1 and 1.0 GHz. The influences and mechanisms of aircraft surface distribution on electromagnetic scattering characteristics were investigated. The results show that for the wing fuselage blended concept, the VV RCS of this frequency range is higher than the HH RCS in most cases, while it is just the opposite for the flying-wing concept. As for the two aircraft concepts, the RCS levels of HH and VV both decrease with the frequency increasing, but the HH RCS has a faster downward trend. The surface distribution has little influence on HH RCS characteristics. On the contrary, it has a significant impact on VV RCS characteristics, and the amplitude of the VV RCS increases with the surface thickness.