A technique for analyzing radiation from conformal antennas mounted on arbitrarily-shaped conducting bodies

This paper presents an efficient method to solve the problem of radiation f rom conformal aperture and microstrip antennas mounted on arbitrarily-shape d conducting bodies. The method, based on the surface equivalence and recip rocity principles, uses a combination of the Finite Difference Time Domain (FDTD) and Method of Moments (MoM) techniques to substantially improve the computational efficiency of the radiation pattern calculation. When the geo metry and location of the radiating element are modified, only a small port ion of the overall analysis requires re-simulation. This leads to a signifi cant improvement in computational efficiency over presently-used techniques , and can substantially improve design efficiency when included in an optim ization loop. The technique is first validated by solving two canonical pro blems, namely a thin slot which is oriented either axially or azimuthally o n an infinitely long, perfectly conducting cylinder. These patterns are the n compared to those produced by the same slots mounted on finite length cyl inders. Finally, patterns are computed for a cavity-backed elliptical patch antenna mounted on an infinite-length PEC cylinder and compared to pattern s computed by an alternate method.