A Hybrid Method for Fast and Efficient Evaluation of Electromagnetic Performance of the Radome-Enclosed Antennas

Abstract

In this article, a fast and efficient hybrid method that combines the volume-surface integral equation (VSIE) and the modified surface integration (MSI) method is proposed to evaluate the electromagnetic (EM) performance of the large-/medium-sized radome-enclosed antennas (REAs). An approximate equivalence principle is presented to formulate the physical model for the EM radiation of the REA, and then, the full-wave VSIE for the antennas and the high-frequency MSI method for the dielectric radome are coupled with each other in an iterative manner. Since mutual interactions up to the second order among the antennas and the radome are considered, the method shows good accuracy in both the near- and far-field regions of the REA system. In addition, all the computation processes involved in the method, including the method of moments (MoM) solution of the VSIE, surface integrations (SIs) in the MSI, and ray tracing for determining the local transmission matrix for the dielectric radome, are accelerated by the multilevel fast multipole algorithm (MLFMA), which makes the method highly efficient in terms of both computational time and memory requirement. Numerical results show that the proposed hybrid method can predict the EM performance, e.g., the input impedance and radiation pattern, of the REA system with good accuracy compared with the full-wave simulations.