Comparison of spherical wave ray tracing and exact boundary value solutions for spherical radomes

Much radome analysis is based on plane wave ray tracing techniques which combine conceptual simplicity with reasonable accuracy. As increasing demands on the performance of airborne antennas necessitate more accurate methods of analysis for the enclosing radome, an exact idea of the limits of applicability of the ray-optical approximation becomes more critical. In an effort to contribute to this subject, we have taken a single layer spherical radome excited by a dipole source oriented parallel to the z-axis and computed its transmitted electric and magnetic fields using a spherical wave ray tracing technique and also by solving the electromagnetic boundary value problem exactly. The exact solution is used as a standard against which the ray tracing approximation can be compared. In this paper, we compare the field patterns of the two solutions by varying the dipole offset distance, the observation point position, wall thickness, dielectric constant, wavelength, and curvature. Parameter values and the compared field patterns are examined in terms of the theory, and conclusions are drawn as to which parameters affect agreement most strongly.