Conformable Antennas Solutions for tunable Beam – SAMBA

A RF missile seeker shall be considered as a track radar requiring a tremendous high accuracy in the estimation of speed and angular position of its target. For future use in an evolved context, a conformal antenna RF seeker shall entail competitive advantages, allowing an instantaneous wide field of regard and enabling multimode and multi-beam techniques.
The Conformal Antenna theme is core in our common Lab LATERAL (LAb-STICC ThalEs Research ALliance on Smart On-board Sensor) elaborated between Thales and Lab-STICC. A PhD program on conformal Antennas has been successfully defended in December 2017 and various related projects have been funded on this theme through the MCM ITP (Material & Components for Missile, Innovation Technology Partnership) initiative.

Samba proposal is continuing these research works exploiting the main outcome from the initial PhD program funded by DGA. The goal is to continue the development of a simulation tool with hardware validation of a conformal antenna based RF seeker. A modular approach will permit to simultaneously work on the different blocks of the system while covering a large panel of application needs and globally reduce design costs. Elliptika, a SME proposing innovative antenna designs and brand new manufacturing capacities is joining the consortium. The two main goals of Samba project, the simulation tool and its hardware demonstration will be guided by Thales to catch all the needs and required parameters for the tool and to orientate the technical choices towards the most attractive solution for the development of a future seeker based on this conformal antenna technology. Very high system level elements like waveforms will be part of the simulation tool as well as the experimental validation.
Samba is organized in four work packages. In WP1 we will optimize the existing code out from the PhD program defended in 2017. WP2 will focus on conformal antenna 3D shapes, benefiting of all previous technological studies performed in this domain by the consortium members. In WP3, we will propose adaptive waveforms to maximize detection along canonic missile trajectories. Finally in WP4, we will build a modular conformal antenna demonstrator that will permit to experimentally validate the outcomes of the other WPs and to eventually iterate on the simulation tool performances.
If Samba use case deals with a missile RF seeker, this work shall also benefit to civilian applications like 5G telecommunications, requiring as well antennas with a wide field of regards, multi-beam techniques and complex waveforms.