A boundary-element solution of the Leontovitch problem

A boundary-element method is introduced for solving electromagnetic scattering problems in the frequency domain relative to an impedance boundary condition (IBC) on an obstacle of arbitrary shape. The formulation is based on the field approach; namely, it is obtained by enforcing the total electromagnetic field, expressed by means of the incident field and the equivalent electric and magnetic currents and charges on the scatterer surface, to satisfy the boundary condition. As a result, this formulation is well-posed at any frequency for an absorbing scatterer. Both of the equivalent currents are discretized by a boundary-element method over a triangular mesh of the surface scatterer. The magnetic currents are then eliminated at the element level during the assembly process. The final linear system to be solved keeps all of the desirable properties provided by the application of this method to the usual perfectly conducting scatterer; that is, its unknowns are the fluxes of the electric currents across the edges of the mesh and its coefficient matrix is symmetric.