File Oriented Radome/Antenna Modelling for microwave design team Cobham Antenna Systems
H. G. Dantanarayana, S. Greedy, T. M. Benson
File Oriented Radome/Antenna Modelling for microwave design team Cobham Antenna Systems (Cobham's FORAM) is an electromagnetics software tool which the Microwave Design Team Cobham Antenna Systems use extensively for in-house radome design work. FORAM provides the user with a set of modular building blocks which can be assembled by the user in an appropriate way to solve a given problem. The software, whilst potentially very powerful, thus relies on some understanding of what is going on physically in a given problem for its accurate operation. Typical problems call for the processing of enormous amounts of data; to help with this over-arching control of the FORAM building blocks and their supporting data is provided by the scripting ‘F-Language’. The combination of F-Language and FORAM allows complex models to be constructed.
Project deliverables
- To help Cobham refactor the software tool to run on PCs with 64 bit architecture. With the objective to speed up run-times for large scale simulations, whilst keeping the software PC based. Thus we will also undertake run-time profiling of the FORUM code and report on further remedies to speed up run-time by deploying computing techniques suited to a 64-bit architecture.
- To decrease run-time and increase accuracy for some particular problem configurations of significant practical importance. This part of the project will profile the code to identify possible reasons for these problems, and remedy them. Local coding issues are expected to be amenable to immediate correction, whereas structural deficiencies requiring major rewriting will be documented and a mitigation plan developed.
- Consider the various components of FORAM e.g. near field source elements and arrays and investigate their implementation, accuracy and performance over a range of validation cases. Recommendations for improving accuracy will be proposed and where feasible implemented, using modified approximations or other electromagnetic approaches as appropriate.