Transient response of wire bicone antennas

The bicone is a simple antenna popular for broadband applications. Analysis of the bicone is almost invariably in the frequency domain and for simplicity of analysis it is usually assumed to be constructed from sheets and to have spherical end-caps, although in practice it is often more convenient to construct a biconical antenna from wires and without end-caps. In addition, there are problems for which a time domain analysis is more appropriate than frequency domain analysis; for example when dealing with transient excitation of an antenna by a voltage pulse. The paper describes the computational analysis, directly in the time domain, of biconical wire antennas without end-caps. For this work, the authors have extended and improved the Thin Wire Time Domain (TWTD) code from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The results have been validated by comparison with an independent, semi-analytical model of a sheet bicone without end-caps