Radiation from Circular Waveguide Aperture Fields

Using Complex Conical Wave Objects

Sinisa Skokic1, Stefano Maci2

1
Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing, University of Zagreb, Unska 3, HR-10000 Zagreb, Croatia
e-mail: [email protected]
2
Department of Information Engineering, University of Siena, Via Roma 56, I-53100 Siena , Italy
e-mail: [email protected]

Abstract

This paper demonstrates the application of a new kind of conical wave-objects to the computation of fields
radiated by circular apertures. The radiation integral is transformed into a summation of complex wave-objects by
means of the Fourier series expansion and Generalized Pencil of Functions (GPoF) method, which reduce the starting
integral to a form that can be evaluated in a closed form. The results obtained via the new approach are compared to
those calculated via direct integration of the starting radiation integral. It is shown that a very low number of wave-
objects is required to represent the field of a circular waveguide mode.

1. Introduction

The analysis of beam waveguides and/or reflector systems at mm-wave frequencies is a very large-scale
problem, being that the electrical dimensions of each element under analysis are typically of the order of hundred
wavelengths or more. This brings out the need to develop new analysis methods particularly suited for that frequency
and size range, since the regular approaches become prohibitively slow. Unlike classical numerical methods such as the
Method of Moments or even Physical Optics, which use discretisation in order to numerically solve the starting integral
equation and determine the field irradiated at a certain point, the methods developed for this area strive towards
expressing the field in terms of a relatively low number of “beams”, which are generally speaking wave-objects of
higher complexity, but whose propagation, reflection, and diffraction if possible, can be resolved at least asymptotically
in a closed form. The driving idea, illustrated in Fig. 1, is to expand the starting field into beams, propagate each beam
independently to the element under consideration (e.g. a reflector), obtain the reflected field of each beam in a closed
form and superimpose all the reflected beams to get the total reflected field. In the next step, the reflected total field can
be re-expanded into a new sum of beams, and the process can be repeated, thus enabling the analysis of a complex and
electrically large reflector system such as the beam waveguide.

Figure 1. The illustration of the “beam” approach to the analysis of propagation and reflection.

A number of different objects have been introduced that are more or less suitable to the exposed analysis
approach. These are the Gaussian Beams [1, 2], higher-order Gauss-Laguerre or Gauss-Hermite modes [3, 4], Complex
Source Points [5], etc. Recently, the authors of this article presented a new kind of wave objects [6], introducing a
formulation that has potential advantages over other approaches in that it satisfies two important aspects: 1) the wave
objects respect the wave equation in all space where they are valid, and 2) the expansion of the field into wave objects is
done in a straightforward fashion. Moreover, the new wave objects possess analytical expressions in both spatial and
spectral domain. They also have a directivity property on a cone, which is governed by varying a complex parameter
associated with the z-coordinate, similar to the complex point source of a spherical wave. In this paper, following a brief
summary of how these beams are generated, we will show how they can be used to reconstruct, in the near-field zone,
the field radiated by an aperture with the field distribution of a circular waveguide mode.

2. Formulation

The starting position for our formulation is the spectral-domain radiation integral [7], expressed in cylindrical
coordinates for convenience:

2 2
∞ 2π − jz k − kρ
1 cos (α − φ ) e
∫ ∫ g (k ,α ) e
− j ρ kρ
I ( ρ ,φ , z ) = 2 ρ
k ρ dk ρ dα . (1)
8π j 0 0
2
k − kρ
2

Here, g ( k ρ , α ) is the spectrum of any of the Cartesian components of the electric or magnetic fields, or maybe even of
the related vector potentials. The process of beam generation is done in two steps. First, the function g ( k ρ , α ) is
∞

expanded in a Fourier series in the angular coordinate: (

g kρ , α ) = ∑ c (k )e n ρ
− jnα
; next, the GPoF expansion of the
n = −∞
M 2 2

∑d
bm k − kρ
kind cn ( k ρ ) = mn
e is applied to the Fourier coefficients. The double integral is in this way reduced to the
m= −M

following double summation:

M

I = ∑ cn ∑ d mnWn ( ρ , φ , z + jbmn ) , (2)

n m= −M

where Wn ( ρ , φ , z
) is the n-th order wave object, evaluated at the point ( ρ , φ , z
) with a complex coordinate z
= z + jbmn :
2 2
∞ − jz
k − kρ
e
Wn ( ρ , φ , z
) = e ∫ J n ( ρ k ρ ) k ρ dk ρ
− jnφ
. (3)
2 2
0 k − kρ

As demonstrated in [6], (3) can be evaluated in a closed form, meaning that the starting radiation integral has been
reduced to a sum of functions that are well-behaved in the whole upper half-space ( Re { z
} > 0 ).

3. Application to the Radiation of a Waveguide Mode

The above process is applied to the radiation from a circular aperture field with a TM circular waveguide mode
distribution. This aperture field possesses closed form expressions in both spectral and spatial domain. The variation of
the spectrum along the kρ spectral radial variable is fairly complex and can easily be varied by simple modification of
the mode number, therefore constituting a strong test case for checking the accuracy of the expansion. Furthermore, the
Fourier spectrum in the angular variable can be derived analytically which allows observing and testing the behaviour
of the automated routine based on fast Fourier transform and its influence on the accuracy of the approximation. A
TM mn circular waveguide mode is defined by [9]

m
E mn ( ρ , φ ) = α mn J′m ( α mn ρ ) cos ( mφ ) ρˆ − J m ( α mn ρ ) sin ( mφ ) φˆ . (4)
ρ

For simplicity, we will take only its x-component, whose spectrum can be derived in closed form as

α mn rw
( ) ⋅ {α mn J′m + 1 ( α mn rw ) J m + 1 ( k ρ rw ) − k ρ J m + 1 (α mn rw ) J ′m + 1 ( k ρ rw )} cos ( mα ) cos (α ) .
m −1
E
x , mn k ρ , α = j 2π 2 2
(5)
α mn − k ρ
Here, J m is the Bessel function of m-th order, rw is the waveguide radius, while α mn = χ mn rw , where χ mn is the n-th
zero of J m . The spatial and spectral distributions of the x-component of TM01 mode are shown in Fig. 2.

a) b)
Figure 2. a) Magnitude of the Ex component of a TM01 circular waveguide mode aperture field (rw = 0.024049 m).
b) Magnitude of the x-component of the corresponding spectrum E
x .

a) b)

c) d)

Figure 3. a) and c) Magnitude and phase computed with direct integration;

b) and d) Magnitude and phase computed via expansion in wave-objects.

The validity of the analysis method is established by comparing the results obtained directly via Eq. (1) and via our
complex wave-objects expansion (Eqs. (2) and (3)). The wave number was simply chosen k = 100. The direct
integration was performed analytically in α-coordinate and numerically in kρ in Wolfram Mathematica. It should be
noted that the direct numerical integration is not an easy task due to the presence of a pole and a branch cut for k ρ = k
and some convergence problems had to be overcome. The results are compared in Fig. 3, which shows the values of the
radiation integral computed for the TM01 mode over a 5λ by 5λ cut in a plane 2λ away from the waveguide aperture (i.e.
for z = 2λ, while the aperture is at z = 0).
As can be seen in Fig. 3, an excellent agreement between the original integral and its wave-objects expansion has been
achieved, both in magnitude and in phase. It should be noted that only 16 wave-objects were necessary to completely
reconstruct the field of the TM01 mode, while in kρ plane it was sufficient to sample the spectrum up to kρ = 2k for a
sufficiently accurate GPOF approximation (the spectrum was sampled in 64 points and represented with 8 GPoF
exponents). The automated FFT-GPOF expansion routine, implemented in FORTRAN, determines the appropriate
coefficients bmn and dmn almost instantly while the iterative procedure for the computation of wave-objects, set up in
Matlab, needed approximately 2 minutes to compute the values in 3721 points on a laptop PC with AMD Turion64x2
1.8GHz processor and 1GB of RAM. This time can be made much shorter if the same routine is transferred to
FORTRAN. However, the main advantage of the new representation is the fact that this kind of wave objects satisfies
the wave equation in the whole upper half-space (unlike e.g. Gaussian Beams which are only a paraxial solution of the
wave equation). Other examples and tests have been successfully performed confirming the usefulness of the new
approach, but are omitted here due to space limitations.

4. Conclusion

A novel method for computing the fields radiated by apertures has been presented and its application to the case
of circular waveguide openings has been demonstrated. It has been shown that a very small number of new, physically
correct wave-objects is sufficient to accurately represent the radiation of a TMmn circular waveguide mode. Practical
aspects regarding the sampling in kρ plane for the GPoF expansion have been discussed. The vectorialisation of the
whole process is currently underway.

5. Acknowledgments

This work is supported by ESA-ESTEC, Noordwijk, The Netherlands, and is a part of the "Electromagnetic
Antenna Modelling Component Library” research programme (EAML2, ESA contract n. 18802).

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