Advanced Antenna Pattern Prediction Software

The present text proposes development of a software infrastructure for the prediction of antenna patterns on and around aircraft, for frequencies throughout the electromagnetic spectrum - including UHF through L bands as well as arbitrarily high frequencies - and applicable to aircraft which, like those designed for low observability, contain non perfectly conducting surface materials. Relying on high-order high-frequency integral equation methods, the proposed algorithm constitutes an entirely rigorous, highly enhanced version of the Uniform Theory of Diffraction (UTD): instead of using particular solutions as building blocks, as the classical UTD does, the proposed method obtains highly accurate local solutions from use of certain integral equations introduced recently, which can be solved with limited computational cost for arbitrary frequencies, high or low. The proposed algorithm is rigorous: it is designed to produce numerical solutions which converge to the corresponding exact solutions as discretizations are refined. Because of the high-frequency asymptotics built into them, on the other hand, the proposed methods allow for efficient computations for arbitrary frequencies - in computing times similar to those required by the approximate UTD based methods.