Wizards of Electromagnetism

The major bottleneck in a planar microstrip patch antenna design is finding a field solver with sufficient capacity and speed to handle a large size array antenna. The situation becomes more complicated when the antenna is used for multiple bands. In the past, the antenna problem was usually broken down into small sizes that were integrated (linearly added) later without carrying out an EM simulation at the full structure level. Unfortunately, with this method, coupling at the large structure level is not taken into account. This episode demonstrates how improvements in method of moments field solvers aids designers of large array of microstrip patch antennas. 

Problem: Traditional method of moments field solvers require an amount of memory proportional to the square of the size of the structure being solved (as measured by numbers of nodes, N,  in the solution matrix). This is wasteful, because some nodes are weakly coupled and don’t require storage of their coupling matrix elements.

Action: Apply a modern method of moments solver that uses an amount of memory proportional to N log N.

Results: Structures such as 64-element antenna at C band, and a multi-band shared aperture C (32-element) and X band (128-element) array can be solved faster using the memory in a workstation PC. Larger structures that couldn’t be solved at all before now run within reasonable time and memory contraints.

Read the full details in our presentation EM Insights Series – Episode 2 – Planar Antenna Array

See the full series at EM Insights Series