Backscattering by a Bruderhedral reflector: A physical optics based approach

A Physical Optics model is developed in this work to analyze the backscattering properties of a perfectly conducting Bruderhedral diplane reflector. Such a reflector is obtained by replacing one face of a conventional right angled dihedral corner reflector with a section of a cylinder. It has a relatively large radar cross section and exhibits a much wider lobe in the plane parallel to the seam with respect to a conventional dihedral corner. The here proposed approach employs the Geometrical Optics to take into account the electromagnetic interactions between the faces and furnishes the backscattered field by evaluating the radiation integral involving the induced surface currents in the Physical Optics approximation.