An effective simulation technique for large phased arrays using parallel FDTD method

Abstract

We present an effective simulation technique for large antenna array using parallel FDTD method in this paper. One of the important issues in the simulation of antenna array is the coupling consideration between the antenna elements. The full wave simulation can take the coupling of the antenna elements into account; however, it is either beyond the ability of computer resources or not reasonable simulation time. We introduce an effective simulation method to consider the coupling effect through the multiple simulations of a small local region. The parallel FDTD method has been successfully applied to solve the various EMC and other electromagnetic phenomena. There are two important issues in the simulation of large phase antenna array using parallel FDTD method: (1) each phase distribution requires an independent simulation that losses the wideband feature of FDTD method; and (2) for a very large antenna array, the parallel FDTD algorithm running on a powerful computer cluster cannot solve the most practical phased array problems today. Here, we use the concept of characteristic basis function of an antenna array to efficiently simulate one large antenna array. In this method, we only need to simulate a small array as a basis function with different excitation patterns. The solution to the original array can be obtained by summarizing the basis function weighted by the element factor.