A method for calculating the radiation pattern of a non-planar conformal array

This paper describes the development of a mathematical algorithm to determine the volumetric array factor of a nonplanar conformal array. It shows the vector translation required to collimate the beam of each element to a common point. Following this, an illustration shows the mathematical rotations required to represent each element with respect to a common set of axes. A set of equations describes these rotations in Cartesian mathematical form. These are incorporated into a MATLAB^(R) program to calculate the array factor. The program was tested and validated by comparing its output against that of the commercial method of moments wire antenna simulation tool NEC-WIN PRO ^(R) for a number of array variants. The results were found to be consistent