Analysis of Conformal Antenna Arrays Using Cylindrical Periodic Green's Function and RWG Basis Function

Conformal antenna arrays become more popular on aircraft owing to significant improvement of aerodynamic and stealth performance. Since the interaction between the platform and the antenna array matters in the simulation results and their meshing produces a large matrix, the analysis of conformal array is computationally expensive. In this article, an efficient method is proposed for the analysis of arbitrary conformal array on cylindrical surface. A periodic Green's function combined with the method of moments (MoMs) enables efficient analysis with one unit cell. In addition, the Rao-Wilton-Glisson (RWG) basis function is adopted to describe the surface current of arbitrarily shaped array element. Cylindrical periodic Green's function (CPGF) is calculated by Wynn's epsilon -algorithm to improve the convergence, and a modified sampling procedure is developed for the RWG basis and weighted functions in the MoM. Key metrics of conformal array, such as the reflection coefficient, mutual coupling, and radiation pattern, are efficiently evaluated by the proposed method. The influences of conformal curvature and element interval are studied, indicating that the interval is a more important factor affecting the near-field characteristics. This method and conclusions can assist the design of various cylindrical conformal arrays.