Abstract
This paper uses the unstructured transmission line modeling method to investigate near-field interactions between a broadband microwave antenna and a platform that arise as a result of antenna installation. The antenna, feed line, and the platform are represented by a common meshed model and simulated using a single time-domain numerical method. This paper aims to establish guidelines on how to achieve high accuracy when modeling both the near and far fields of an antenna while at the same time prioritizing computational resources. By isolating critical features such as the feed line and selected fine details of the antenna geometry, this paper assesses how accurately these fine features need to be described in the model and how they affect the return loss and far-field pattern of the antenna. The size of the platform is varied from small to medium size (up to 10 wavelengths) and its impact on the antenna performance is assessed. Finally, the conclusions of the study are applied to an example of an antenna installed in the leading edge of an aircraft wing, with and without, a protective radome cover.
Highlights
There is substantial interest in modeling antennas in their practical setting given that an antenna’s performance can be significantly affected by its surroundings [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14]
Fig. 9b) compares the radiating fields in the E- and H- plane obtained when the antenna is excited using a crude coaxial cable geometry described by 4 segments and a fine geometry described by 50 segments and shows that the geometrical description of the cable does not affect the far field pattern, the results being indistinguishable in both forms of the plots
A 20% saving in the memory and a 30% saving in the runtime is obtained by describing a coaxial cable crudely with 4 segments compared to a fine geometrical description of 50 segments without affecting the far field pattern
Summary
There is substantial interest in modeling antennas in their practical setting given that an antenna’s performance can be significantly affected by its surroundings [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14]. To undertake this study we apply, for the first time, the Transmission Line Modeling method using unstructured meshes (UTLM) [27,28,29,30,31,32,33,34,35] to the problem of installed antennas Selection of this method proceeds from the well-known fact that unstructured meshes require notably fewer sample points to capture curved and multiscale geometries and if used intelligently in a hybrid fashion with Cartesian grids to model large empty space regions, this can be achieved without unduly compromising computational efficiency or with the complexity of bespoke sub-gridding techniques.
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