A novel approach for design of beam steerable aperiodic planar array antenna with reduced number of elements

Abstract

This paper introduces the design of an aperiodic beam steerable planar array antenna using a novel strip-projection (SP) method, offering the reduced array elements with improved peak SLL with beam scan. The SP method generates the aperiodic lattice by projecting a section of the 3D body-centric tetragonal lattice onto the aperture and rotating it using Rodrigue's formula. The optimized lattice parameters are obtained using Jaya algorithm. The proposed SP method requires only three optimization parameters for any aperture dimensions and 21.9% less elements as compared to the rectangular lattice. For comparison, pinwheel-based aperiodic planar array antenna has been designed and analyzed. The peak SLL is maintained <−11.63 dB and <−12.70 dB for 0°-30° beam scan by proposed array and pinwheel-based array respectively. Both types of aperiodic lattice have been populated with S-band dielectric resonator antenna and simulated. Position standard deviation has also been introduced and computed to quantify the aperiodic distribution.