Automatic Hexahedral Mesh Generator for the Electromagnetic Modeling of Complex Navy Platforms with Array Antennas and Radomes

Sophisticated high-fidelity Computational Electromagnetics simulation tools, such as HyPerComp’s HDPhysics-RF software toolset, allow for performance analysis of very complex antennas on full aircraft configurations for Navy applications. Many different antenna types such as passive phased array (PESA), active electronically scanned array (AESA), hybrid beam forming phased array, and digital beam forming (DBF) array can be modeled using these advanced tools without resorting to time consuming and costly physical testing. However, the automatically generated tetrahedral meshes are not always able to ensure highest element quality. Moreover, in cases such as antenna performance analysis on full aircraft platforms, high resolution tetrahedral meshes are required, resulting in high computational burden. In these applications, hexahedral meshes, can provide better quality cells with superior performance while substantially reducing the number of elements. The objective of our proposed STTR phase-I work is to transition the latest advancements in the field of auto hex meshing to the design of a robust, user-friendly, and application-oriented tool tailored to the specific needs under this STTR solicitation. Our software will fully couple CAD models to the discretized domain required by electromagnetics solvers for simulation of antenna performance on Navy aircraft platforms.