A New Efficient Thickness Profile Design Method for Streamlined Airborne Radomes

The streamlined shapes of airborne radomes tend to cause severe degradation of the electromagnetic (EM) performance, which can be compensated by properly designing the radome thickness profile. Conventional variable thickness radomes based on optimization method yield excellent EM performance at the expense of 1) considerable design time consumed by the inevitable optimization process and 2) potential manufacturing difficulties as thickness profile tends to vary dramatically in the entire range of the radome. In this communication, we present an efficient thickness profile design method through introducing the concept of half-wave thickness under average incident angle. No optimization process is involved and gentle thickness profile variation is naturally guaranteed by the gradual variation of radome shape which determines the average incident angle. Both 2-D and 3-D cases are considered in computing the average incident angle. Results of a tangent-ogival airborne radome validate the effectiveness of the proposed method.