A truncated Floquet wave diffraction method for the full wave analysis of large phased arrays. I. Basic principles and 2-D cases

Abstract

This two-part sequence deals with the formulation of an efficient method for the full wave analysis of large phased array antennas. This is based on the method of moments (MoM) solution of a fringe integral equation (IE) in which the unknown function is the difference between the exact solution of the finite array and that of the associated infinite array. The unknown currents can be interpreted as produced by the field diffracted at the array edge, which is excited by the Floquet waves (FWs) pertinent to the infinite configuration. Following this physical interpretation, the unknown in the IE is efficiently represented by a very small number of basis functions with domain on the entire array aperture. In order to illustrate the basic concepts, the first part of this sequence deals with the two-dimensional example of a linearly phased slit array. It is shown that the dominant phenomenon fur describing the current perturbation with respect to the infinite array is accurately represented in most cases by only three diffracted-ray-shaped unknown functions. This also permits a simple interpretation of the element-by-element current oscillation, which was described by other authors.