Optimization Of The Radiation Pattern Of Conformal Antenna Array By Space Mapping Algorithm

Among all of the conformal patch antennas, cylindrical conformal antennas and their corresponding arrays are the most commonly used ones in military applications, thus received extensive attentions nowadays. There were already some effective numerical methods that can be used for the precise analysis of the cylindrical conformal patch antennas, such as MoM, FEM and FDTD, and so on. However, with the development of RF technology which was widely used in military and civilian applications, conversional methods can hardly meet the needs to design or optimize an antenna rapidly because they usually cost much more time to calculate curved structure compared with plane structure especially when the fine model of antenna is optimized, thus other new appropriate optimization methods become intensely necessary. John W. Bandler and his group put forward the concept of space mapping algorithm in 1994 for the first time, its basal idea is constructing a space mapping between the the coarse model and fine model. Then find the design parameter of the coarse model by making the response of the coarse model approach the response of the fine model. After that, get the final design parameter of the fine model through the space mapping. As a ressult, because the optimization process mainly works towards the coarse model, the compute time is greatly reduced.In this article, we extended SMA to the optimization of the radiation pattern of a conformal antenna array for the first time. Cavity mode theory and full-wave electromagnetic simulation software HFSS was used to analyze the coarse model and the fine model respectively in order to avoid the extremely long time cost by conversional SMA method, because in conventional SMA method, the study are all based on MoM, which request coarse model to be roughly mesh and fine model to be finely mesh. To achieve enough accuracy, the mesh grid must be fine enough even for the coarse model, which would reduce the compute speed apparently. Numerical results show that the method can greatly reduce the computational time and increase design efficiency. On the other hand, because the process needs to combine Matlab with VBS script to automatic modeling, it's also a good show of how to establish Vbs scripting and then transfer to HFSS.