    |
|
|
|
|
Stan Kubina (Electrical and Computer Engineering) was pleased to discover that a system developed here nearly 20 years ago has been cited in the latest U.S. Military Specification system, which governs the design, development and testing of modern aircraft.
Every aircraft's electrical, mechanical and avionics systems and their antennas must be carefully monitored to assure total electromagnetic compatibility in every mode of its operation, and engineers and designers have to foresee and overcome any possible harmful interaction of these systems.
Back in the late 1970s, a Concordia research team of two faculty members, four scholarship graduate students and a systems analyst, funded by a research contract with the Canadian Department of National Defence, developed a system called AAPG (Antenna inter-Antenna Propagation with Graphics) for the safe operation of aircraft.
A new manual of U.S. Department of Defence technical standards, just released, calls AAPG "an
effective software tool for antenna-to-antenna coupling analysis. AAPG models the aircraft with a combination of cylinders or truncated cylinders and flat plates to estimate isolation between antennas as a function of free-space loss and shading by the fuselage and wings. Isolation in conjunction with other parameters allows a first estimate of interference levels between subsystems."
Because of funding cutbacks, Concordia's Electromagnetic Compatibility (EMC) Lab no longer gets grants from the Defence Department, which would allow the EMC Lab to produce an upgrade of the AAPG system. However, a U.S. government body called the Joint Spectrum Centre is developing an AAPG 2000 version.
