Software Tools for Analysis and Design of Antennas on Treated Platforms

The growing reliance on wireless electronic systems presents us with a need for new diversity antennas for civilian and military platforms. These antennas must take account of platform curvature, material treatments and nearby interactions, all of which affect the antenna performance. To support the development and design of these antennas, a new generation of analysis is required which retains geometrical adaptability and material generality in addition to being capable of treating small details on large scale platforms. We propose to develop such software by combining two powerful and flexible methods. One of them has already been shown to be highly effective in modeling complex, conformal antenna configurations on doubly curved platforms whereas the second approach is an established methodology for modeling large scale platform interactions. We will develop a software package which integrates the two methods along with improvements for platform treatments and near zone field interactions. The proposed software suite will be run on engineering-class workstations and will rely on CAD geometrical descriptions of the antenna and surrounding platform. We are confident that commercially-viable software will result from this effort and will incorporate a variety of visualization tools (for geometry and antenna parameter display) and graphical interfaces.