Design of Ku band Conformal SatCom antenna for Aerospace Applications

Modern aircraft aim to achieve high aerodynamic agility and low RCS. Conformal antennas can solve the biggest hindrance in this regard, namely the aerodynamic drag introduced by on-board antennas, by integrating them with the aircraft structure. In this paper, an effort has been made to use the conformal mapping technique for design and analysis of a rectangular patch antenna array for SatCom applications. A 2×2 sub-array operating at Ku band is designed and conformed to a cylindrical surface. The effects of curvature on the characteristics of the antenna array is analyzed and compared with its planar counterpart. It is shown that the designed array can be used as a sub-array for the fabrication of a high gain antenna, which will meet the gain requirements in order to maintain a communications link with a geo-stationary satellite.