Space Antenna Handbook

Chapter 2

Space Antenna Modeling

Jian Feng Zhang, Xue Wei Ping, Wen Ming Yu, Xiao Yang Zhou, Tie Jun Cui

School of Information Science and Engineering, Southeast University Nanjing China

2.1 Introduction

Since World War II, numerous techniques for solving scientific and engineering problems have been developed based on numerical approaches with the aid of electronic computers [1]. In 1952, computer-aided simulation methods were first used on the weather forecast and gained great success. In the past few decades, various numerical methods have been developed and used in different areas, producing many new branches such as computational electromagnetics (CEM), computational fluid dynamics (CFD), computational physics, computational chemistry, and so on. CEM is a new subject that combines numerical methods with electronic computers to solve problems in electromagnetics.

In space applications, communications between various systems are mainly achieved through electromagnetic waves generated by different types of antennas, such as the helix antenna for telemetry and tracking control, the antenna array for the data downlink and navigation, and so on. Radiation patterns of such antennas should be well designed to meet practical requirements. Theoretically, this can be determined by solving Maxwell's equations. However, for most practical antennas, the closed-form solutions of Maxwell's equations are too complex to obtain by pencil and paper. Hence numerical simulation methods based on ...