Simplified Radar Configuration Evaluation Tool

"The development of future combat systems will have signature control as one of the requirements that needs to be considered. The designer needs to trade vehicle shape and material treatments to minimize the total RCS of the vehicle. The currentgovernment standard model for performing this task, Xpatch, requires a complicated process to transfer the geometry and set up the run, and takes many hours to days to perform the calculation. This limits its usefulness as an aid to the design process.The RadBase code, developed by Surface Optics Corporation, uses a different analytical approach and performs the same calculation in a fraction of the time on a PC Based platform. This proposal is to integrate the RadBase code with a commercial CAD tool(ProE) to provide a fast and efficient RCS calculator to the design engineer. In Phase I a partial integration is planned with RadBase run outside the ProE environment, which in Phase II will be implemented as a ProE plug-in. In addition, SOC willintegrate a database of material optical properties (dielectric permittivity and permeability) into the CAD data structure, and as an optional task design a laboratory/field instrument, which will be produced in Phase II. The benefits of this effort wouldbe a significantly enhanced capability for the design of vehicles with low RCS requirements. The development of a portable instrument for measuring material RF optical properties will provide greater