Dielectric radome analysis using multilevel fast multiple algorithm

A fast algorithm based on the volume integral equation is described for the analysis of antenna-radome interaction problems. The algorithm is implemented for both tetrahedron and hexahedron meshes, and is applicable to model arbitrarily shaped 3D dielectric radomes. The application of the multilevel fast multipole algorithm (MLFMA) significantly reduces the memory and CPU time requirement for solving the volume integral equation, and hence the algorithm presented in this paper can be applied to problems with electrically large sized radome. This algorithm is different from the ray tracing methods in that it yields highly accurate solution for radomes that contain small-scale geometric variations such as the sharp portion of the ogive radomes.