Design and Realization of Ultra-wideband Constant Beamwidth Beamforming in a Waveguide Environment

Abstract

Array signal processing technology has been widely used in signal detection and underwater target radiation noise measurement. A design and realization method of an ultra-wideband and high-robustness constant beamwidth beamformer based on a vertical nested array is proposed. Using the nested array multiplexing, the ultra-wideband constant beamwidth beamforming was realized by using fewer array elements; the main lobe of each sub-band beam in the designed band was made to approach the desired constraint value based on the convex optimization method; the beamforming robustness and array gain were improved through the constraint of the weight vector two-norm. In the paper, the influence on beamforming due to inconsistent array element amplitude-phases in a measured waveguide environment is analyzed. The computer simulation was used to realize the measurement of constant beamwidth beamforming within a 100-octave band range in the measured waveguide environment and verify the effectiveness of the proposed method.