Astigmatic beam tracing hybridised with FDTD for on board antenna analysis

Abstract

An hybrid FDTD-ABT scheme has been proposed for the electromagnetic field analysis of an on board antenna. The hybrid method resorts to a spherical wave expansion to link the FDTD code to the ABT code, i.e. spherical harmonics are used to provide ABT with a suitable description of the source modelled with FDTD. This approach exploits the ability of FDTD to treat detailed models of the antenna and its nearby structures while ABT is able to perform the analysis of the satellite environment.