Antenna coupling inside aircraft using ACA direct method

A proper study of electromagnetic interferences inside an aircraft has become essential with the recent increase of electronic devices on board. Their effects on the airplane communications and electronic systems need to be considered at an early stage of the design process. Numerical simulations are often used to perform this analysis. However, the large electrical size of the model at high frequencies provokes significant computational time and memory requirements. Although a number of “fast” iterative methods exist, the cavity-like structure of the aircraft arises some convergence issues reducing their applicability for this sort of problem. The proposed direct method solves the Method of Moments (MoM) linear system by the use of the Adaptive Cross Approximation (ACA) algorithm to reduce the matrix size and computational time. Unlike “fast” iterative solvers, a direct approach is used to avoid convergence problems. A good agreement between simulations with CAPITOLE-EM software using ACA compression and measurements is shown for a simplified aircraft mockup.