DESIGN AND SIMULATION OF RADIO FREQUENCY SEEKER ANTENNA STABILIZATION

M Geetha Reddy, R. Sundararajan

Abstract: Present day guided weapon systems, especially tactical class missiles use RF seeker, for target tracking towards terminal engagement. The seeker system including its antenna assembly will be onboard the missile. Due to the missile trajectory corrections, the seeker antenna pointing to the target may get disturbed resulting in track loss. To avoid this track loss, it becomes necessary to stabilize the antenna system in two planes. The fundamental role of stabilization loop in seeker application is to precisely follow the angular rate of the target. In order to achieve this requirement, it is essential to highly isolate the gimbaled antenna from the missile body motion due to the maneuvering of target or low frequency vibration during flight. However, the isolation ratio and stability margin of stabilization loop adopting the gimbaled platform with both low stiffness and heavy inertia are limited by mechanical characteristic such as low resonance frequency and its high magnitude. The selection of proper feedback sensors, modeling of the total system are key features of this project. In the end, the performance and the stability of designed stabilization loop are demonstrated using simulation in both frequency and time domain. The Hardware for the system is under realization by the Industry. The whole scheme is simulated in MATLAB off-line for this project.

Keywords: Missile, RF seeker, Track loss, Stabilization loop, Angular Rate Command, Bore-Sight Error, Maneuvering and Gimbaled Platform.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.15623/ijret.2016.0508060