| Tactical missiles, such as the Patriot MIM 104, have circular cylindrical fuselages on which array antennas can be flush-mounted for battle damage assessment/indication (BDA/BDI). In addition, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have by necessity flush-mounted phased arrays for survelliance operations. While UAVs of complex shapes, such as the AFRL SensorCraft, are very common, the problem of modeling the performance of such scanning beam arrays appears is difficult due to the presence of double and variable curvatures relevant to the non-canonical geometrical shapes. (Indeed, the modeling of a conformal array on the SensorCraft wing is a very challenging problem from a computational viewpoint.) To that end, for fast and reliable generation of the performance parameters, it is a well founded experience that exact modeling approaches become redundant or inapplicable with increasing frequency, or, for electrically large radii of curvatures. The information gleaned from the literature suggests that the high frequency technique, Uniform Theory of Diffraction (UTD), is perhaps the only viable approach to mitigate against such formidable computational difficulties.
The UTD, being essentially a ray- or quasi-optic technique, enjoys the advantage of generating accurate results as the frequency increases. The UTD formulations are, in many cases, heuristic generalizations of the high-frequency asymptotic solutions to the canonical problem for a circular cylinder or sphere. Due to this feature, the limitations of these formulations in the various geometrical regions of the physical space surrounding a flush-mounted antenna are not readily identifiable. Consequently for the canonical model of a circular cylinder, the UTD solution needs to be compared against experimental data or other available techniq ues.
The important aspect of mutual coupling between elements in a phased array antenna thus needs extensive validation. To that end, to understand the effects of curvature on the scan characteristics, arrays of thin axial and circumferential slots located on a circular cylinder shall be analyzed using UTD. Comparative analysis against available experimental data and other high-frequency techniques, distinct from UTD, will be presented.
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| Deb Chatterjee received the Bachelor's (BETE) and Master's (MTech) degrees in 1981 and 1983 from Jadavpur University and IIT Kharagpur, India, respectively. He received MSEE and PhD degrees from Concordia University, Montreal, Canada, and University of Kansas, USA in 1992 and 1998, respectively. Since August 1999 he has been with the Computer Science and Electrical Engineering department, UMKC where he is now an associate professor. Dr. Deb Chatterjee's current principal research interests are in design, modeling of ultrawideband, miniature microstrip antenas, and planar and conformal phased arrays with applications to missile systems and tactical platforms. His recent reserach focusses on developing computationally efficient techniques for modeling antennas on such complex platforms. Dr. Chatterjee is a member of the IEEE Antennas and Propagation, and, the Applied Computational Electromagnetics Societies, respectively. |