Analytical method for monostatic radar cross section calculation of a perfectly conducting wind turbine model located over dielectric lossy half space

Abstract

Radar cross section (RCS) of a wind turbine has a key role for determining possible effects of wind farms on radar and navigation systems. Closed form expressions of the physical optics technique are applied to calculate monostatic radar cross section of an electrically large wind turbine model over a dielectric, lossy half space. The model is constructed with perfectly conducting canonical structures. First-order effects of the half space to the electromagnetic scattering mechanism are approximated with four-path model. Doppler spectrogram of the turbine model over lossy ground is obtained using short-time Fourier transform. The closed form expressions provide very-fast RCS calculations for different broadside directions and blade rotation speeds. Performance of this proposed method shows that it is suitable for real-time simulations that analyse the effects of the wind farms to the radar and navigation systems performance.