Closed-Form Green's Functions in Planar Layered Media for All Ranges and Materials

An important extension of the two-level discrete complex image method is proposed to eliminate any concerns on and shortcomings of the approximations of the spatial-domain Green's functions in closed form in planar multilayered media. The proposed approach has been devised to account for the possible wave constituents of a dipole in layered media, such as spherical, cylindrical, and lateral waves, with the aim of obtaining accurate closed-form approximations of Green's functions over all distances from the source. This goal has been achieved by judiciously introducing an additional level into the two-level approach to pick up the contributions of lateral waves in the spatial domain. As a result, three different three-level algorithms have been proposed, investigated, and shown that they work properly over all ranges of distances from the source. In addition to the accuracy of the results at all distances, these approaches also proved to be robust and computationally efficient as compared to the previous algorithms, which can be attributed to the fact that the sampling of the spectral-domain Green's functions in the proposed approaches gives proper emphasis to the associated singularities of the wave types in the spectral domain. However, the judicious choices of the sampling paths may not be enough to get accurate results from the approximations unless the approximating functions in the spectral domain can provide similar wave natures in the spatial domain. To address this issue, the proposed algorithms employ two different approximations; the rational function fitting methods to capture the cylindrical waves (surface waves), and exponential fitting methods to capture both spherical and lateral waves. It is shown and numerically verified that a linear combination of exponential functions in the spectral domain represent the lateral waves at the interface of the involved layers.