Antenna Placement on Airbus A320

Numerous 3D modeling tools are being used in engineering. Despite the obstacles of proprietary file formats and limited support for open formats, the interoperability of different modeling tools becomes increasingly important due to overall optimization of design and production processes. WIPL-D Pro CAD introduces wide support for transferring various models created in third-party tools into WIPL-D Pro 3D EM Solver.
The Airbus A320 model, shown in Fig. 1 was imported from an IGES file. The airplane length is 37.6 m, wing span is 34.1 m. The models contains details such as windows and jet engine parts. No model repair was needed after import. Using an adaptive meshing algorithm, an all-quad mesh was created (Fig. 2) that adequately represented all the details and yet created larger quads on the fuselage and wings to use the speed of higher order MoM to full extent.

Using the cropping and defeaturing techniques in WIPL-D Pro CAD, the model was split in half and simplified by removing all windows (Fig. 3). A quarter wavelength monopole was then placed on the fuselage and the gain of the system was calculated at 833 MHz, with the airplane being 104 λ long at this frequency.

Rigorous higher order MoM in combination with adaptive expansion order reduction and the out-of-core solver results in:

The resulting radiation pattern in the symmetry plane is shown in Fig. 4.

Placement of a small antenna on three different positions on the aircraft was investigated next in order to establish the influence of the wings and the tail on the radiation pattern. A half-wavelength dipole was placed above the airplane fuselage at midpoint between the wings and the nose, at wings, and at midpoint between the wings and the tail (Fig. 5). The simulation frequency was 1.53 GHz which meant the airplane was about 190 λ long.
Rigorous higher order MoM in combination with adaptive expansion order reduction and the out-of-core solver results in:

The simulations were done on a desktop computer with a Core 2 Quad CPU running at 2.83 GHz clock rate.

The radiation patterns in the symmetry plane for three different positions of the dipole are shown in Fig. 6.

The influence of the tail is clearly visible in case when the dipole is placed at the back (the encircled disturbances in Fig. 6).
A comparison of the three radiation patterns with a radiation pattern of a dipole above infinite PEC plane is given in Fig. 7. This can give us a hint as to how large of a difference is between the airplane fuselage and a infinite flat PEC plate at the frequency of interest. The diagram shows that the position of the placed antenna does not make a significant influence to the overall radiation pattern and that hemispherical coverage of the space above the airplane is possible even from a position near the tail (Fig. 8 gives the radiation pattern in dB).

Download PDF     Back to Antenna Placement