Abstract:
Horn antennas are often employed in receivers operating in the millimetre and
submillimetre regions. High performance horns exhibit efficient coupling to
incoming electromagnetic radiation, low cross polarization and low sidelobe levels
over a large bandwidth. The Pickett-Potter horn (PPH) has many of the desired
properties, and it is easy to fabricate for use at terahertz frequencies.
In this work, a software package with optimization tools was constructed for
designing horns with cylindrical symmetry. For a given horn geometry, the
electromagnetic fields inside the horn were calculated using the Modal-Matching
technique. The radiation patterns were calculated from the fields at the aperture using
the Kirchhoff’s aperture diffraction theory. The horn geometry that gave the best
performance was obtained after optimizing with a combination of the Genetic
Algorithm (GA) and the Downhill Simplex (DS) method. The objective function for
the optimization routines included the beam circularity and the cross polarization
level. The GA process was first used to locate the proximity of the global solution.
The DS took the solution found by the GA as a starting point and refined the
parameters to the required accuracy.
The software package was used to design PPHs for general use. Two design
curves are given for PPHs with beamwidths from 16.0 to 31.5 degrees