Orthogonal design method for optimizing roughly designed antenna

Abstract

Orthogonal design method (ODM) is widely used in real world application while it is not used for antenna design yet. It is employed to optimize roughly designed antenna in this paper. The geometrical factors of the antenna are relaxed within specific region and each factor is divided into some levels, and the performance of the antenna is constructed as objective. Then the ODM samples small number of antennas over the relaxed space and finds a prospective antenna. In an experiment of designing ST5 satellite miniantenna, we first get a roughly evolved antenna. The reason why we evolve roughly is because the evolving is time consuming even if numerical electromagnetics code 2 (NEC2) is employed (NEC2 source code is openly available and is fast in wire antenna simulation but not much feasible). Then the ODM method is employed to locally optimize the antenna with HFSS (HFSS is a commercial and feasible electromagnetics simulation software). The result shows the ODM optimizes successfully the roughly evolved antenna. © 2014 Qing Zhang et al.