Combination of MLFMA and ACA to Accelerate Computation of Scattering from Underground Targets

Electromagnetic nondestructive evaluation of underground targets is of great significance for the safety of urban construction. Based on the accurate and efficient simulation of scattering, we can detect the underground targets successfully. As one of the most popular numerical methods in electromagnetics, surface integral equations solved by method of moments (MoM) are used to simulate the scattering from underground targets in this paper. The integral equation is discretized by RWG basis and Galerkin testing. Multilevel fast multipole algorithm (MLFMA) is used to decrease the computation complexity and memory cost. However, the octree used in MLFMA is not applied for rough surfaces and targets together; both the surface and target need to construct octree separately. Since the combination of MLFMA and ACA can build a more efficient method to compute scattering from underground targets, adaptive cross approximation (ACA) is used to compress the impedance matrix instead of MLFMA for the coupling action between the rough surface and target. That is to say that, when calculating the scattering of two targets, target self-interaction is suitable for MLFMA calculation and the coupling between targets is approximated by ACA. Numerical results demonstrate the accuracy and efficiency of our proposed method.