What is ADF-EMS?

ADF-EMS stands for “Antenna Design Framework – ElectroMagnetic Satellite”.

The name highlights that it has been designed to provide full engineering cycle support to scientists and engineers working in the antenna field, with special reference to space field applications:

1) “Antenna Design Framework” means that it supports antenna designers in their activities. A dedicated environment is available for arrays, a technology now also emerging in the space field. Modellable antenna types will be augmented in the future following a step by step policy.

2) “ElectroMagnetic Satellite” means that it supports payload integrators in the phase of integrating antennas aboard the satellites, providing tools to control interference risk (RFC, PIM…) and optimize performance.

ADF-EMS is a framework integrating several electromagnetic modelling methods in a homogenous environment. Both general purpose and specialized electromagnetic modelling tools are available.

The framework provides a set of common services for project data management, computation control, CAD model definition, meshing, e.m. data processing and visualization. Graphical interfaces are intuitive and user-friendly.

 What isn't ADF-EMS?

ADF-EMS is not a “code-centred” tool.

This means that it is not based on just a single modelling method. It is a real framework embedding several modelling methods/tools providing the best state of the art codes for a wide range of antennas, frequencies, shapes and materials.

A set of common framework services and conversion functions have been specially designed to enable sharing and translation of antenna models.

What are the ADF-EMS keywords?

ADF-EMS is characterized by the keywords:

• Full Engineering cycle support: the user is supported through the whole design process, starting from antenna design up to verification of the antenna performance when installed aboard the satellite.

• Multi-Methods: the same problem can be analysed using more than one modelling method/tool. Comparing results obtained with different methodologies increases confidence in their accuracy and therefore addresses the design with suitable safety margins.

• Combined Methods: complex modelling procedures can be built using the results of one modelling step as the input to the next one. This kind of procedures is very useful when complex problems (that cannot be accurately solved using just one method) are being analysed. 

• Industry-oriented: ADF-EMS provides procedures for managing complex industrial applications, where features such as “configuration control”, “repeatability”, “effectiveness”, “team working” and “project documentation” are deemed to be essential to save time and money and reduce design risks. Briefly:

• the context sensitive menu guides the user along modelling procedures
• project management functions
• “analyses and data history management” keeps track of data modification when fast test repetition is required. The risk of data loss is minimized, and when a configuration is frozen, all preliminary tests can be easily removed.
• client-server architecture to execute complex and demanding simulations on network nodes with high computational resources
• workload balancing policy to distribute computation on a network of servers
• Open-tool: antenna model import and export functions are available:
  • antenna models computed by third parties or user’s modelling tools can be imported and used to analyze the antenna performance when installed aboard a satellite or used as an array radiating element
  • experimental data can be imported and used as antenna models.

What about ADF-EMS validation?

All modelling tools have been validated on canonical and real life applications (versus technical literature data and experimental data).The “ADF-EMS Validation Book” is available to ADF-EMS users.

Some highlights of interesting features

• a CAD suite tool to define the geometry of antennas and structures;
• a suite of dedicated, easy to use pre-processing and meshing tools;  
• several electromagnetic modelling tools for the analysis of antennas and structures using algorithms validated in the  10MHz-70GHz range;
• special fast algorithms tailored to array analysis; - a  set  of  functions  to  process/convert  antenna models to make them suitable for interaction analysis;
• graphic 3D tools for post processing and visualisation.