Scattering by cavity-backed antennas on a circular cylinder

Conformal arrays are popular antennas for aircraft, spacecraft, and land vehicle platforms due to their inherent low weight and drag properties. However, to date there has been a dearth of rigorous analytical or numerical solutions to aid the designer. In fact, it has been common practice to use limited measurements and planar approximations in designing such non-planar antennas. The finite element-boundary integral method is extended to scattering by cavity-backed structures in an infinite, metallic cylinder. In particular, the formulation specifics such as weight functions, dyadic Green's function, implementation details and particular difficulties inherent to cylindrical structures are discussed. Special care is taken to ensure that the resulting computer program has low memory demand and minimal computational requirements. Scattering results are presented and validated as much as possible.