Optimal Design Of Composite Radome

Radomes, which are used to protect the antennas from adverse environmental effects of lightning,static electricity, rain erosion and high temperature, etc, are usually made of composite. There designprocess involves multiple disciplines such as electromagnetism, mechanics, etc. The rapiddevelopment of all industries propose higher requirements for the comprehensive performance of thecomposite radome. To improve the comprehensive performance and shorten the design cycle, thisarticle studied the optimal design of composite radome.Firstly, the equivalent transmission line theory method was chosen to calculate the powertransmission efficient of the multilayer flat and the Aperture Integration-Surface Integration(AI-SI)method was chosen to calculate the electrical properties of the radome. Both the methods wereprogrammed by MATLAB software. Two examples were calculated by the programs. The resultsshowed that both the programs are correct and they could be used for the analysis of radomes’electrical properties.A composite radome model was established in MSC.Patran/Nastran by meshing, assigning materialand element properties and adding load and displacement constraints. Based on finite element method,nonlinear static analysis and bulking analysis were done with the model. The results were obtainedand used to check the stiffness, strength and stability of the composite radome.Mathematical model for the optimization of the radome was established. A optimization schemewas proposed which takes the electrical properties as the objects and the mechanical properties as theconstraints. The equivalent transmission line theory method was employed to analysis the electricalproperties while the finite element method (FEM) was employed to analysis its mechanical properties.A composite radome optimization process was established based on the genetic algorithm (GA). Anexample was calculated and the results show that the electrical properties of the radome wassuccessfully improved under the ensurance of the mechanical properties. Numerical results revealedthe feasibility of the optimization method.