A public, scientific, and technical establishment with industrial and commercial responsibilities, ONERA reports to the French Ministry of Defense, and is an essential partner in the French and European aeronautics and space community. ONERA''s Dept of Electromagnetism and Radar (DEMR) conducts testing and research to improve electromagnetic-based systems for industry and the French arms procurement agency.
The Automation Challenge
DEMR needed to build three automated test systems in the shortest possible time. The systems measure reflection and transmission coefficients of planar materials as functions of frequency, incidence, and incident wave polarization in both copolarization and cross polarization. They then calculate the complex values of permittivity and permeability for homogeneous materials.
The test program makes the measurements with a vector network analyzer, such as the Agilent 8720, displays the results graphically, and exports them automatically into a Microsoft® Excel spreadsheet. The test system must control two antennas (one for emission and one for reception), positioners for the antennas, and translators for the material under test through the GPIB bus. (Figure 1)
To achieve breakthrough development speed, DEMR established four purchase criteria for the application software:
- ease of use and learning,
- exceptional productivity in program development,
- efficiency in controlling instruments and devices, and
- integration with MatLab software (the preferred analysis software at ONERA).
The Solution
DEMR chose Agilent VEE Pro for the application software without hesitation, since it met all of their criteria.
With VEE Pro, the development work for the automated characterization systems is simple and fast. The program automates the control of the positioners and translators. Then, it configures the vector network analyzer. (Figure 2)
Once the reflection and transmission measurements for the given antennas and sample positions are taken, VEE Pro modules calculate permittivity and permeability of the material under test. MatLab scripts, seamlessly integrated with VEE Pro, display complete, interactive graphs of the results. (Figure 3) Finally, the program exports the results to an Excel spreadsheet to document the results.
