NUMERICAL SIMULATION AND WIND TUNNEL TEST ON GROUND RADOME UNDER WIND LOAD

Wind load is one of the main loads on ground radomes, which affects the strength and stability of the radome and also affects the accuracy of the radar antenna, resulting in partial focal point deviation and defocusing. Thus, the research on radomes under wind load is an important aspect in the design of radomes. In this paper, SolidWorks is used to establish the radome gemotory model. After meshing the model in ANSYS ICEM CFD, the radome is imported into FLUENT to calculate the flow field under wind load. Three turbulence models, including the standard model, RNG model and Reliable model, are adopted to calculate the coefficient of aerodynamic characteristics and pressure distribution in FLUENT. As a result, it can be found that the RNG model is more suitable for the simulation. Moreover, a wind tunnel test is performed to verify the simulation results under wind speed of 20 m/s, 28 m/s and 36 m/s, respectively. Then, the wind pressure on the radome surface in the simulation and experiments is compared. It is found that the pressure curves on the windward side of the radome in the simulation match the experiment very well, while the results obtained on the cover body side and leeward side show a deviation. Furthermore, wind pressure on the radome appears to increase with the increase of wind speed. According to the comparison results obtained in the numerical simulation and wind tunnel trials, it can be concluded that the application of the numerical simulation in radome design fields plays an important role, and the data obtained in the simulation is also meaningful to direct wind tunnel test in real engineering fields.