BVH-Accelerated Ray Tracing for High-Frequency Electromagnetic Backscattering

TL;DR

This paper introduces a GPU-accelerated shooting and bouncing rays method combined with BVH for efficient high-frequency electromagnetic backscattering modeling of large metallic objects.

Contribution

It presents a novel BVH-accelerated ray tracing approach coupled with physical optics for high-frequency electromagnetic simulations, enabling efficient analysis of large-scale problems.

Findings

Validated against analytical Mie solutions for PEC spheres.

Successfully applied to complex aircraft geometry for radar cross-section prediction.

Achieved significant acceleration using GPU and MPI parallelization.

Abstract

As computational complexity in electromagnetics increases with frequency, full-wave solvers become computationally infeasible for electrically large problems. To address this limitation, we present a shooting and bouncing rays (SBR) method for efficiently modeling electromagnetic backscattering of metallic objects in the high-frequency regime. The method couples multi-reflection geometrical-optics ray transport with a physical optics surface integral discretized over ray tubes. To reduce the massive ray-surface intersection search space, we use a bounding volume hierarchy (BVH) and organize the computation as a trace-integrate pipeline. The ray tracing generates hit data, and the physical optics integral is evaluated over valid intersections only. Numerical accuracy is controlled through an incident-ray sampling rule that mitigates phase aliasing in the discretized physical optics integration. The method is accelerated on NVIDIA and AMD GPUs and parallelized with MPI. We validate against analytical Mie solutions for a perfectly electrically conducting (PEC) sphere and demonstrate applicability to a complex aircraft geometry for monostatic radar cross-section prediction.