A Fast Electromagnetic Radiation Simulation Tool for Finite Periodic Array Antenna and Universal Array Antenna

Abstract

The domain decomposition method (DDM) enables efficient simulation of electromagnetic problems in large-scale array antennas using full-wave methods on moderate hardware. This paper introduces and compares two nonoverlapping DDMs serving as preconditioners with outstanding simulation efficiency. The first method targets finite periodic array antennas by transforming a single array unit rather than explicitly modeling the entire array, effectively leveraging repetitive structures to significantly reduce memory usage and computation time. The second method applies to universal array antennas with arbitrary geometries, employing both planar and nonplanar mesh-based domain partitioning at subdomain interfaces for flexible modeling of complex arrays. To further enhance computational performance, we propose a parallel multilevel preconditioner based on the block Jacobi preconditioner, thereby accelerating the solution efficiency of subdomain matrix equations in both methods. Additionally, since the choice of domain partitioning method significantly impacts the computational efficiency of DDMs, we propose three different subdomain partitioning strategies. These strategies enable us to accelerate computations while expanding our capacity to simulate a wider variety of types of cases. We developed a fast electromagnetic radiation simulation tool utilizing these techniques. Simulations of exponentially tapered slot (Vivaldi) antenna arrays and antenna arrays with radomes demonstrate that our tool achieves accuracy comparable to commercial software, and notably, our tool outperforms commercial software in terms of the speed of iterative solutions.