An Efficient and Versatile Technique for the Synthesis of 3D Copolar and Crosspolar Patterns of Phase-Only Reconfigurable Conformal Arrays With DRR and Near-Field Control

Abstract

An accurate and flexible iterative algorithm of power synthesis for reconfigurable arrays is proposed. The algorithm is based on an alternating projection approach, and is suitable for arrays of arbitrary geometry, thus including conformal and sparse arrays. It allows to generate a number of copolar and crosspolar radiation patterns satisfying assigned requirements, switching each pattern into any of the others by phase-only control of the excitation applied to each array element. Moreover, the algorithm allows to reduce the dynamic range ratio (DRR) of the excitations and the maximum electric field amplitude in a region close to the antenna. A modified version of this algorithm including the previous one as a particular case, is then proposed, which introduces, as an additional capability, the reduction of the power radiated in the side lobe region, in presence of the above constraints, and the squared amplitude of the electric field in an assigned region close to the antenna. This allows to significantly improve the final results. Numerical examples, including a comparison with existing literature, show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.