Optimization of a Broadband Discone Antenna Design and Platform Installed Radiation Patterns Using a GPU-Accelerated Savant/WIPL-D Hybrid Approach

Traditional design guidelines for broadband antennas do not always produce satisfactory performance for the desired frequency range of interest. In addition, the accurate prediction of the freespace antenna performance is not sufficient to determine if the antenna will meet a larger system requirement because the performance of the antenna can change significantly when it is installed on a platform. Antenna design software, such as WIPL-D, addresses the difficulties of designing antennas with broadband performance by providing optimization software that can automatically resize the various antenna dimensions until a desired performance criterion is met. At high-frequencies, the electrically large size of the platform makes it computationally difficult, or impossible, to directly consider the interactions between the antenna and the platform when designing the antenna in a full-wave solver. This paper describes an approach for the design and optimization of a discone antenna and then the subsequent installation on a large commercial aircraft. The antenna design will be optimized across a wide frequency range using WIPL-D Optimizer. The resulting discone antenna design is then imported into SavantHybrid, a hybrid asymptotic and full-wave solver, and the installed antenna performance is simulated using GPU acceleration at multiple potential antenna locations to determine the location that provides the least-degraded installed antenna performance.