Synthesizing Non-Uniformly Excited Antenna Arrays Using Tiled Subarray Blocks

Abstract

Conventionally, non-uniformly excited antenna arrays are synthesized by independently determining the excitation amplitude and phase of each single element. Such an approach is considered to be the most expensive and complex design method available. In this paper, the tilling technique is harnessed to synthesize non-uniformly excited antenna arrays. To apply this technique, the array elements are first divided into different subarray shapes, such as rectangles or squares known as tiles. The use of rectangular tile blocks instead of a single element architecture greatly simplifies the array design process and reduces array complexity. Next, the problem concerned with synthesizing sub-arrays comprising rectangular tile blocks is formulated and solved by using horizontal and vertical orientations of tiles having different shapes and sizes, and their larger integer expansions. The third approach to tiled design is a mixture of both previous tile architectures. A genetic algorithm is used to design such tiled arrays offering optimum sidelobe levels, beam width, directivity and taper efficiency. Simulation results demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed tiled arrays.