Thickness profile design of airborne radomes with thickness control

The streamlined shapes of airborne radomes tend to cause severe degradation of the electromagnetic (EM) performance, which can be compensated by properly designing the thickness profile of the radome. However, the obtained thickness profile may vary dramatically in the entire range of the radome, which would impose great difficulties on manufacturing. In this paper, thickness control is introduced in the optimization process to deal with this problem. The design variables are the thickness value of several discrete points along the radome central axis, from which the thickness profile are obtained through B-spline interpolation. The thickness control is realized through including the variance of the design variables as a new optimization objective. A tangent ogival radome is employed for simulation and the results are discussed. The obtained new radome design can be more easily fabricated than the traditional variable thickness one.