Efficient Analysis of SKA-Low Antenna Arrays with Dynamic Macro Basis Functions

The SKA-Low radio astronomy telescope forms part of the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) project. Accurate electromagnetic modelling of SKA-Low arrays consisting of SKA log-periodic antenna (SKALA) elements, is crucial to optimising the instrument’s performance. The current approach is to use iterative solvers based on the multilevel fast multipole method (MLFMM), however, the associated computational cost is a limiting factor to exploring station design layouts. This paper presents SKA-Low antenna array analysis results, using an alternative dynamic macro basis function (MBF) iterative solver and nested cross approximation (NCA). Significant runtime improvements over the MLFMM solver in the commercial FEKO software suite are demonstrated.