An efficient iterative MoM-PO hybrid method for analysis of an onboard wire antenna array on a large-scale platform above an infinite ground

An efficient iterative Method-of-Moments (MoM) - Physical-Optics (PO) hybrid method is proposed for analyzing the performance of an installed wire antenna array, considering both the effects of an electrically large, complex platform, and an infinite planar ground. For large-scale models, the proposed Efficient Iterative MoM-PO (EI-MoM-PO) method is much faster than the conventional MoM-PO method, due to integrating image theory into the iterative hybrid framework to cleverly describe the effect of the infinite planar ground. Numerical results showed that the EI-MoM-PO method has excellent efficiency and accuracy, compared to the conventional MoM-PO method and to the multilevel fast multipole algorithm. In particular, if we compare the EI-MoM-PO method with the conventional MoM-PO method, the EI-MoM-PO method retains the same accuracy with the same number of unknowns. Simulated three-dimensional radiation patterns clearly demonstrated the disturbance of the platform and the infinite ground on the radiation characteristics of the installed antenna array, which is a very interesting phenomenon for real antenna array design.