A Hybrid Tolerance Design Method for the Active Phased-Array Antenna

Abstract

With the increase of the working frequency of the array antenna, tolerance design has become increasingly important. The state-of-art tolerance design methods mainly deal with the position tolerance of the discrete elements. However, the geometric errors of the whole array have resulted from two aspects: (1) the position errors of the discrete elements and (2) the form errors of the continuous reflection plate. To optimize the position tolerance and flatness simultaneously, a hybrid tolerance design method is proposed. First, the relation between the performance of the array antenna and hybrid tolerances was determined based on the second order Taylor expansion. Then the expectation and variance of the performance were derived. Finally, the hybrid tolerances were optimized and the performance of the antenna was improved. Simulation results proved the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed hybrid tolerance design method.