Performance Assessment and Optimization of Installed Antenna and Radome

The principal elements for creating an efficient, accurate, and robust suite of tools for combined radome/antenna design are currently within view. The challenge is to integrate these elements in a package that is easily applied to optimizing radar system performance when the antenna is installed on a specific platform behind a radome that must meet both structural and aerodynamic constraints. Several ongoing activities at HyPerComp can make substantial contributions to the development of the integrated design and analysis capability: 1. The discontinuous Galerkin solver for Maxwell"s equations is being implemented in a new framework that runs efficiently on either CPU clusters or CPU/GPU clusters, where it is expected to scale almost optimally with problem size and the order of accuracy of the field representations. Technical improvements, such as the implementation of curved grid elements on physical boundaries, permit high accuracy in the surface fields without packing the surface with flat facets or the interior with tiny cells. Orders of magnitude speedup on a CPU/GPU cluster have already been demonstrated for a similar time-domain Maxwell solver. 2. The mathematical details underlying both interpolation in multiparameter design and the implementation of reduced basis methods are being analyzed specifically for full-wave solutions of Maxwell"s equations. 3. The problems of importing and repairing CAD representations of aircraft and related structures for use in a full-wave solver have been solved here in other programs, and a next-generation volume grid generator that meets all of the relevant criteria is nearing completion.