Antenna Placement Optimization on Large, Airborne, Naval Platforms

Antenna placement on electrically large aircraft bodies is becoming a critical issue. Use of full-wave solvers to assess the on-platform performance of an antenna or the interaction between two antennas is impractical, both in terms of computing resources required and length of execution time. The next best choice is to use a high-frequency code. To address this issue, Applied EM is developing state of the art UTD (Uniform Theory of Diffraction) code for faceted CAD geometries. Although not as accurate as full-wave codes, high-frequency codes require modest computer resources and are faster than full-wave codes. In a serial mode, however, even these codes can take substantial time to execute depending on platform size and complexity. During this SBIR, Applied EM and its team members are proposing porting of already developed UTD code to both CPU and GPU-based parallel environments for the purpose of greatly accelerating the performance. During Phase I, we identified bottlenecks in current algorithms and also identified existing algorithms that may be problematic in transferring to a parallel environment. During Phase II, we plan to develop a commercial grade GPU based UTD code that will be commercialized.