Biologically inspired coupled beampattern design

Abstract

Inspired by the female Ormia ochracea's mechanically coupled ears, we propose to design a small-size transmission coupled antenna array with high performance radiation pattern. The mechanical coupling provides the female Ormia with high localization accuracy despite the small distance between its ears compared with the incoming wavelength of the source signal. The mechanical coupling between the Ormia's ears has been modeled by a pair of differential equations. In this paper, after solving these differential equations governing the Ormia ochracea's ear response, we convert the response to the pre-specified radio frequencies. Using the converted response, we then design a biologically inspired uniform linear array composed of finite-length dipole antennas including also the undesired electromagnetic coupling due to the proximity of the elements. In our numerical examples, we compute the radiation intensity of the designed system for binomial and ordinary end-fire arrays to demonstrate the improvement in the half-power beamwidth, sidelobe suppression, and directivity of the radiation pattern due to the biologically inspired coupling.