A Broadband Multipole Method for Accelerated Mutual Coupling Analysis of Large Irregular Arrays Including Rotated Antennas

TL;DR

This paper introduces a fast, broadband multipole method for analyzing mutual coupling in large, irregular antenna arrays, including rotated antennas, significantly reducing computation time.

Contribution

It extends the Method of Moments with a Macro Basis Function approach and a stable multipole expansion to efficiently analyze large irregular arrays across a wide bandwidth.

Findings

Simulation of 256 antennas completes in 10 minutes per frequency.

Supports arrays with arbitrarily rotated antennas at low additional cost.

Requires only pre-computation of antenna patterns, reducing setup time.

Abstract

We present a numerical method for the analysis of mutual coupling effects in large, dense and irregular arrays with identical antennas. Building on the Method of Moments (MoM), our technique employs a Macro Basis Function (MBF) approach for rapid direct inversion of the MoM impedance matrix. To expedite the reduced matrix filling, we propose an extension of the Steepest-Descent Multipole expansion which remains numerically stable and efficient across a wide bandwidth. This broadband multipole-based approach is well suited to quasi-planar problems and requires only the pre-computation of each MBF's complex patterns, resulting in low antenna-dependent pre-processing costs. The method also supports arrays with arbitrarily rotated antennas at low additional cost. A simulation of all embedded element patterns of irregular arrays of 256 complex log-periodic antennas completes in just 10 minutes per frequency point on a current laptop, with an additional minute per new layout.