Large Phased Arrays Diagnostic via Distributional Approach

Abstract

Abstract-A deterministic method for detecting faulty elements in phased arrays is proposed and tested against experimental and numerical data. The solution approach assumes as input the amplitude and phase of the near-field distributions and allows to determine both positions and currents of radiating elements. The corresponding non linear inverse problem is properly solved by exploiting the distributional approach, which allows to cast the initial problem to the solution of a linear one, whose solution is made stable by adopting a proper regularization scheme based on the Truncated Singular Value Decomposition tool. The results fully confirm accuracy of the proposed technique. MOTIVATIONSMany applications, ranging from sonar, radar and space communications, need for fully active phased arrays [1][2][3]. These antennas have several hundreds of radiating elements or proper sub-arrays [2,3], and the possibility of their failure strongly increases. These element failures can cause sharp variations in the aperture field across the array aperture, thus increasing both the sidelobes and the ripple level of the far-field radiation pattern. In order to know which element or elements are damaged, active antennas can include calibration systems. TheseCorresponding author: M. D'Urso (mdurso@selex-si.com).

Monitoring linear antenna arrays using an exponentially weighted moving average-based fault detection scheme

“…The problem of antenna monitoring has been addressed by several researchers. Over the past few decades, many monitoring techniques have been proposed for the detection of faults in radiation patterns of antenna arrays, which are based on Bayesian compressive sensing (Oliveri, Paolo, & Massa, 2012), NN (Castaldi, Pierro, & Pinto, 2000;Rawat, Yadav, & Shrivastava, 2012;Vakula & Sarma, 2009), GA (Rodriguez, Ares, Palacios, & Vassal'lo, 2000;Yeo & Lu, 1999), case-based reasoning (Iglesias et al, 2008), bacteria foraging optimization (Acharya, Patnaik, & Choudhury, 2011), exhaustive searches (Rodriguez-Gonzalez, Ares-Pena, Fernandez-Delgado, Iglesias, & Barro, 2009), support vector machine (Rajagopalan, Joshi, & Gudla), and distributional approach (Buonanno, D'Urso, Cicolani, & Mosca, 2009).…”

Self-Calibration for Fault or Obstacle Correction in Continually Rotating Array Antennas

“…In many applications, a modification of the antenna characteristics is not allowed and diagnostic tools are necessary to prevent it. In most cases, diagnostic tools [3][4][5] are limited to fault detection in the case of array antennas and cannot detect or correct the effect of obstacles in a near environment of the system, while existing calibration tools [6][7][8] are devoted to static environments and typically cannot be included in realistic environments.…”

Practicability Analysis and Application of PBG Structures on Cylindrical Conformal Microstrip Antenna and Array

“…As is shown in Fig. 9, where the distance between elements of proposed array is 18.2 mm, integrated with groove loaded microstrip feeding with the depth l slot , for the matching of input impedance with the antenna [24,25], calculated by…”