An efficient approach for the analysis of irregularly contoured planar phased arrays with tapered excitation in complex environments

Abstract

An efficient uniform high‐frequency representation of the radiation from a large irregularly contoured planar tapered phased array, which is accurate throughout the near, intermediate, and far field zones, is presented. The planar array is regarded as the superposition of a sequence of parallel line arrays, and each one of them is represented in terms of equivalent continuous tapered lines via the Poisson summation formula. The amplitude tapering along the line is asymptotically approximated by a physically based, observation‐dependent linear combination of a small number (seven at most) of equiamplitude linearly phased excitations, which allows the reconstruction of the dominant contributions. After superimposing the asymptotic contributions of each line array, the total radiated field from the planar array is described in terms of rays emerging from the actual endpoints on the array rim and from a discrete sequence of points in linear loci on the surface of the array. As a consequence, high‐frequency techniques may effectively be used to describe the interaction of these rays with the surrounding environment.