The use of piezoelectric actuators to modify an antenna radiation pattern has
been investigated recently. In this paper, a doubly curved paraboloid antenna of
Lexan®
material is considered, and the optimal size, location, and field of the piezoelectric
actuators are determined, for steering the radiation. The deformation induced by the
piezoactuators is determined using a shell element modified for this purpose, and validated
using extensive experiments on curved beams and shells with piezopatches. The genetic
algorithm is used as the optimization tool. One of the contributions of this paper is a
formulation of the optimization problem which reduces the computational effort
significantly. A reasonable amount of steering with good beam quality is achieved.