A New Method to Analyze Broadband Antenna-Radome Interactions in Time-Domain

Abstract

Based on the new time-domain finite integration theorem (TDFIT), a fast and accurate method is proposed to analyze broadband antenna-radome interactions in time domain. Due to the time-domain feature, broadband characteristic is obtained in a single simulation. In numerical simulations, the antenna array is placed inside an enclosed or semi-closed radome by using a presented local waveguide port. The staircase error in traditional finite-difference time-domain method is reduced by a novel conformal technique. An illustrating broadband antenna array with radome, operating at millimeter wave frequency is analyzed and optimized to show the high performance of our method. A new broadband transmittance of the antenna-radome system is proposed to incorporate the side lobe effect, and it is treated as the objective function to optimize the parameters of the antenna-radome system. Furthermore, the full wave simulation, combined with an artificial neural network (ANN) algorithm, is utilized to accelerate the antenna-radome optimization. About half of the time for computation has been reduced.