Windscreen Modelling

The windscreen antenna solution method reduces the computational requirements by meshing only metallic elements while analysing the behaviour of the integrated windscreen antennas within their operating environment. The analysis can take into account the physical features of windscreen antennas and their surroundings.

The following physical features are taken into account when analysing windscreen antennas:
  • Finite sized windscreens
  • Arbitrarily curved (no extreme curvature) windscreens
  • Multiple dielectric windscreen layers (glass, plastic and other dielectric materials)
  • Multiple windscreens in a vehicle (multiple glass definitions supported)
  • The vehicle body
  • The presence of real ground

The analysis is based on the MoM and can be used in conjunction with the multilevel fast multipole method (MLFMM). It is an efficient approach due to only including the vehicle body and metallic antenna elements in the MoM mesh. The windscreen layers are not discretised.

Numerous electromagnetic characteristics of the windscreen antenna can be computed, including:
  • Current distribution on the antenna and vehicle
  • Input impedance bandwidth and scattering parameters
  • Near field distributions and far field radiation patterns


Figure 1. An example of a windscreen antenna (on the left) and an automobile with a far field and near field result (on the right).