Abstract
The conformal load-bearing antenna structure is a new multidisciplinary concept of aircraft structure, in which a microstrip antenna is layered into a composite material structure. For the manufacturing defects in the packaging of the microstrip antenna and the composite material radome, a retrieval method of the defects’ dimension by antenna's far field data has been presented. Two inversion formulas have been derived: one is the inversion from the far field data to the transmission coefficient of the radome; the other is from the transmission coefficient to the dimension of the radome. The combination of the two formulas could realise the inversion from the far field to the defects’ dimension. A 12·5 GHz conformal load-bearing antenna structure with four microstrip antennas is used in the simulation experiment. The results of the simulation show the precision and validity of the retrieval method.