A Novel Inversion Method of Manufacturing Flaws in the Packaging of Conformal Load-Bearing Antenna Structure

Abstract

Composite material is widely used in the conformal load-bearing antenna structure (CLAS), and the manufacturing flaws in the packaging process of the CLAS will lead to the degradation of its wave-transparent property. For this problem, a novel inverse method of the flaw's dimension by antenna-radome system's far field data has been proposed. Two steps are included in the inversion: the first one is the inversion from the far filed data to the transmission coefficient of the CLAS's radome; the second one is the inversion from the transmission coefficient to the flaw's dimension. The inversion also has a good potential for the separable multilayer composite material radome. A 12.5 GHz CLAS with microstrip antenna array is used in the simulation, which indicates the effectiveness of the novel inversion method. Finally, the error analysis of the inversion method is presented by numerical simulation; the results is that the inversed error could be less than 10%, if the measurement error of far field data is less than 0.45 dB in amplitude and ±5 ∘ in phase.

Effect and experiment of curvature radius of 3‐D printed conformal load‐bearing antenna array on EM performance

“…The proposed spherical CLAA is based on a 4‐patch planar array . There are some differences: (a) 8‐patch is used in this work instead of 4‐patch in References ; (b) the material of substrate is different, then the geometric parameters of patch and array are little different; and (c) spherical surface is used in this work instead of planar array in References . For the proposed 3D CLAA (non‐developable surface, like spherical surface), there is not a fabrication method in commercial use except the proposed 3‐D printing technology according to the authors' knowledge.…”

“…To satisfy aerodynamic requirement of carriers, CLAA usually has special outline, it is very similar to airborne radome . A typical CLAA is fabricated by creating a planar patch array, then embedding it into a specific shape composite structure . In that conventional fabrication technology, the CLAA must have developable outline, which means the surface can be developed to a plane.…”

“…3 A typical CLAA is fabricated by creating a planar patch array, then embedding it into a specific shape composite structure. 4 In that conventional fabrication technology, the CLAA must have developable outline, which means the surface can be developed to a plane. Therefore, for the special CLAA which has non-developable surface, the conventional fabrication technology is incompetent, 5 its fabrication is a big challenge.…”

Radiation from a Millimeter-Wave Rectangular Waveguide Slot Array Antenna Enclosed by a Von Karman Radome

“…As they distort the transmitted and received radar signals, they require electromagnetic analysis. Extensive studies have been conducted on the electromagnetic characteristics of radomes [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14]. Ray tracing and physical optics (PO) method were suggested to analyze radomes [1].…”

“…The scattered fields of the Von Karman radome were calculated by using the MoM [8]. The radiation pattern of the conformal load-bearing antenna structure was calculated using the ray tracing-surface integration [9]. The boresight error (BSE) induced by a gimbal angle is analyzed by using the ray tracing technique [10].…”