Analysis of failure impact on microwave power combining

The design of power combiner needs to take the different cases of outages into account. The tool presented in this paper aims to automate simulations of the failure impact on the nominal operation of any microwave combiner. It is an alternative to commercial software that deals with this failure analysis. Indeed, this automated tool reduces the designer operations by calculating, for each outage, the new scattering parameters of the divider/combiner. Moreover, it estimates output power level or graceful degradation. Therefore, it facilitates the comparison of different isolation solutions for the same combiner according to the `isolation/loss´ compromise. Preliminary results from a radial divider (1 coaxial access toward 8 rectangular waveguides) are presented.