An Efficient Full-Wave Method for Analyzing the Radiation Pattern of an Antenna Enclosed by an Axisymmetric Radome

This article proposes an efficient full-wave method to analyze the radiation pattern of an antenna in the presence of a multilayer axisymmetric radome. In this method, first, the field distribution on the antenna aperture is replaced with the respective equivalent currents to compute the incident electromagnetic field on the inner surface of the radome. The radome is then modeled with a cascaded network of two-port devices and generalized transmission lines based on the theory of surface equivalence and the method of moments. The cascaded network is used to relate the tangential components of the electromagnetic field at the inner surface of the radome to their counterparts at the outer surface of the radome which, in turn, are used to obtain the respective equivalent currents. Finally, these currents are used to determine the radiation pattern of the antenna in the presence of the radome. The efficiency of the proposed method is demonstrated by comparing the simulation results of several case studies with those obtained by the rival theoretical models in the literature or computed by commercial numerical codes.