FAST HYBRID FEM/CRE-UTD METHOD TO COMPUTE THE RADIATION PATTERN OF ANTENNAS ON LARGE CARRIERS

A hybrid method is developed to compute the radiation pattern of antennas on large complex three-dimension carriers. The hybrid method involves computing the radiation fields of the antenna in free space with FEM, characterizing the reflection and diffraction of the carrier to the radiation fields with CRE (Complex Ray Expansion) and UTD (Uniform Theory of Diffraction). The ray technique of SBR using traditional hybrid method is employed by CRE. The shortcomings of the SBR, such as great number of ray trace, distortion and partly shadowing of the rays etc., are overcome by the use of CRE, and the time consuming physical-optics-type integration is replaced by the paraxial approximation of the complex rays. A dipole placed on different carriers are taken as the examples to show the validity of the hybrid method, and the radiation patterns computed by the proposed method are in good agreement with those by FEM. By using the proposed method, the computation of the three dimension radiation pattern of an antenna in a large ship is finished by a PC in 1671.20 seconds.