Advanced Antenna Pattern and Mutual Coupling Prediction Software

Numerical methods have proved very successful in low and mid frequency (VHF/UHF) regimes. However, these full wave methods are not efficient in handling electrically large problems dealing with radiation and coupling predictions for antennas on aircraft at higher frequencies (S/X/Ku/Ka bands).On the other hand, asymptotic/high frequency (HF) methods, such as the physical optics (PO) method and its modifications based on the physical theory of diffraction (PTD), do not scale with frequency. At these high frequencies, the uniform geometrical theory of diffraction (UTD) is more efficient and provides a physical ray intepretation for antenna radiation mechanisms and antenna interactions on large aircraft platform. However, simulations of large platforms using UTD has so far been accomplished using airframe models relying on canonical objects, thus, limiting use of UTD codes in handling curved structures such as a fighter aircraft. Applied EM along with its team members is proposing an advanced toolset based on UTD to handle CAD geometries that are body-conforming. This toolset will be also allow for interface with high fidelity antenna modeling tools. The proposed software will be capable of fully or partially coated (with material) realistic aircraft platforms using available diffraction methods. Radiation pattern predictions and coupling among antennas on the airframe will be handled efficiently using ray techniques within the context of UTD. A friendly graphical user interface with pre- and post-processing capabilities will be an integral part of the toolset, and will allow for CAD importing and visualization of realistic aircraft models as well as display of the physics and output datasets.