Low scattering design of wideband tightly coupled conformal arrays based on scattering cancelation method

Abstract

The scattering reduction of wideband and wide-scanning angle conformal array is urgently demand and still a significant challenge. Toward this end, a wideband low-profile cylindrically conformal tightly coupled antenna array (TCAA) with low-scattering characteristics is designed in this paper. Based on the scattering cancelation principle, the performance of wideband low-scattering is achieved by the fully use of two different types of tightly coupled antenna elements (TCAEs) arranged in a chessboard-like. The two types of array elements are carefully designed to have similar radiation performances and required reflection phases. Moreover, to accurately measure the scattering performance of the proposed conformal array, a low-scattering metal oliva carrier is designed to embed the RF testing cables and matching loads. Finally, a 10 × 10 conformal array prototype is developed, fabricated and tested. The simulated and measured results show that the proposed conformal array prototype works from 6 GHz to 18 GHz with a scanning range of ±60° in E-plane and ±45° in H-plane, while it also achieves about 13 dB monostatic scattering cross section (SCS) reduction across a wide frequency band of 6∼18 GHz as compared with a reference array.