On the weighting optimisation of the antenna with overlapped subarrays architecture

Abstract

In large array radars, subarray technology can be used to reduce the complexity and cost of system under the restriction of freedom degree. The overlapped subarray, which has high application value, is investigated in this study. For the array antenna with overlapped suabarrays architecture, the traditional weighting methods (such as the two staged tapering method) optimise the subarray pattern and subarray array factor independently, which cannot directly control the final pattern. Based on the analysis of the pattern and the application of overlapped subarrays, a new weighting optimisation method is proposed in this study. By optimising the final antenna pattern directly, the proposed method can obtain the high performance pattern with the lower sidelobe level, the higher taper efficient and the higher gain flatness in the field of view. Moreover, the computation complexity of the new method is very low since its basic algorithm is the linear programming. A set of representative numerical results are reported to validate the effectiveness and potentiality of the proposed method.