Simulating Gigascale Antenna Arrays with Open Source Software

The antenna arrays required for space based solar power are the largest ever conceived, by several orders of magnitude. The development of LyceanEM has provided an open source electromagnetics library with tools for rapid virtual prototyping of antenna arrays, beamforming, and both frequency and time domain channel modeling with 10s of billions of elements. An overview of the workflow for designing, simulating, and assessing the performance of gigascale space based solar power will be discussed with kilometer scale antenna array examples. Finally some of the proposed approaches in beamforming power transfer shall be introduced.