Electromagnetic Interactions Between Cables, Antennas, and Their Environments

Navy aircraft use complex cable harnesses to transfer data and provide power to avionics, weapons, sensors, control surfaces, and landing gear. The cable harnesses and the aircraft must be designed so that interference to an electronics unit does not occur. Design approaches must address the cable harness packing, separation, shielding, and layout to avoid crosstalk between conductors within an individual harness and between multiple cable harnesses. In addition to crosstalk, interference can occur due to onboard antennas coupling into cable harnesses (or vice versa), lightning strikes near or directly to the aircraft, electromagnetic pulse (EMP) events, and High Intensity Radiated Fields (HIRF). EMA3D Cable is a mature simulation tool for addressing these types of cable harness problems in a rigorous manner when design details about the cable harnesses and the rest of the aircraft structure and systems are available. EMA3D Cable leverages decades of full-aircraft validation, including a recent validation for NAVAIR on the Triton Platform. However, a solution does not currently exist for the early stages of an aircraft design when such details are not available or for when designers wish to perform a design trade study without performing a rigorous solution for the entire aircraft. A simulation tool is needed that can be used for all stages of an aircraft design while retaining the investment in the model development from previous stages of design. Electro Magnetic Applications, Inc. (EMA) is the world leader for consulting, measurement, and simulation of cable harnesses in aerospace platforms for the past 40+ years. The company expertise includes lightning direct and indirect effects, EMP, HIRF, RFI, and several other technical areas within EM and RF. The EMA3D Cable software tool was developed specifically for modeling complex cable harnesses in aerospace platforms and has been validated many times including several prominent publications with aerospace companies such as Airbus, Bombardier, Embraer, The Boeing Company, and others. Through this effort, EMA will add multi-fidelity cable harness modeling capabilities to the EMA3D Cable product such that analysts can use the same tool from the very early conceptual stages of an aircraft all the way through final testing and certification.