An incremental theory of diffraction for objects with local cylindrical shape

In this paper, a quite general systematic procedure is presented for defining incremental field contributions, that may provide effective tools for describing a wide class of scattering and diffraction phenomena at any aspect, within a unitary, self-consistent framework. This is based on a generalization of the localization process for cylindrical canonical problems with elementary source illumination and arbitrary observation aspects. In particular, it is shown that the spectral integral formulation of the exact solution may also be represented as a spatial integral convolution along the axis of the cylinder. Its integrand is then directly used to define the relevant incremental field contribution. This procedure, that will be referred to as a ITD (Incremental Theory of Diffraction) Fourier transform convolution localization process, is explicitly applied to both wedge and circular cylinder canonical configurations, to define incremental diffraction and scattering contributions, respectively. These formulations are asymptotically approximated to find closed form high-frequency expressions for the incremental field contributions. This generalization of the ITD localization process may provide a quite general, systematic procedure to find incremental field contributions that explicitly satisfy reciprocity and naturally lead to the UTD ray field representation, when it is applicable.