News Releases

December 2006

The FERMAT project team, bringing together Onera with the Université Paul Sabatier in Toulouse and the OKTAL-SE company, rewarded with the "Science and Defense" prize

Châtillon, the 14^th of December 2006 – The FERMAT*project team has received the "Science and Defense" prize. This project designed a tool modeling the ineraction of an electromagnetic wave with a complex scene.

The FERMAT project team, bringing together engineers from Onera, researchers from the Université Paul Sabatier and computer scientists from OKTAL-SE, has just received the "Science and Defense" prize. Each year, this prize, presented by Michèle Alliot-Marie, the Minister of Defense, on the 14^th of December, rewards prize winners who have contributed in an eminent way to the progress of science and techniques in fields of interest to defense.

The FERMAT (Functionalities for Electromagnetism and Radar using Asymptotic Methods) project's result was the creation of software for predicting the fields resulting from the interactions of an electromagnetic wave with a complex scene made up of natural or artificial objects in their environment. In order to get the best possible compromise between the quality of the results and the numerical calculation time, this modeling is based on the coupling of the ray launching technique, mastered by the OKTAL-SE company's computer scientists, with the asymptotic rays and currents methods developed by Onera's engineers (Electromagnetism and Radar Department) and the researchers at the Université Paul Sabatier (Micro-Wave Antennae, Devices and Materials Laboratory). This software is a unique tool for studies concerning radar, the radiation of antennae, inter-system electromagnetic compatibility and propagation.

The FERMAT approach can be used for numerous applications in the Defense field: predicting the Radar Equivalent Surface of complex targets (aircraft, missiles, UAVs...) surrounded by their natural environment, evaluating the detection performances of new radar sensors, synthesizing radar images for recognizing and identifying targets or objectives, calculating electromagnetic interactions between neighboring items of equipment, etc.

The FERMAT tool also solves the problems of major industrial customers needing, on the one hand, to specify, develop and qualify complex electromagnetic systems and, on the other, to reduce the costs and delays of full scale experiments by supplementing them with simulations.

In a market largely dominated by American technologies, the FERMAT code, marketed by OKTAL-SE under the name of SE-RAY-EM, has great development potential.

* FERMAT Project-Team:

• André Bergès, Vincent Gobin, Henri-José Mametsa (Onera) - www.onera.fr
• Paul Combes, Sarah Laybros (Université Paul Sabatier)
• Jean Latger, Paul Pitot (OKTAL-SE) - www.oktal-se.fr

Last Update: 23 January 2007 - © ONERA 2009 - Terms of use