Effects of ray refinement within the INSTANT software when applied to large-scale arbitrarily shaped perfectly conducting bodies

A pre-requisite for antenna installation is the ability to quantify the effects on antenna performance of structures within the vicinity of the antenna. As part of the BAE Systems Antenna Modelling Facility, a software suite known as INSTANT (short for INSTalled ANTenna Performance) has been developed by Culham Electromagnetics and Lightning Ltd in conjunction with BAE Systems and TranscenData. By employing a ray tracing algorithm, INSTANT is capable of predicting antenna performance, including antenna-antenna interactions, in the presence of almost arbitrarily shaped perfectly conducting bodies. The exponential growth in ray numbers, following one-many interactions, such as edge diffraction, influences computational efficiency in many ray-tracing algorithms. By implementing ray refinement, INSTANT is able to achieve improvements in code execution times and the accuracy of the results obtained.