System Simulation Modeling for Near-field Millimeter Wave Synthetic Aperture Imaging Radiometer

Abstract

Due to the fact that theoretical analysis and instrument construction for antenna array of synthetic aperture imaging radiometer (SAIR) are both complicated, and designers usually hope to predict the imaging effect and analysis the influence of relevant parameters of SAIR before the system design. The imaging simulation is a very useful method in the system design of SAIR. This paper is devoted to establishing an accurate imaging model for simulating the process of near-field millimeter wave SAIR. In this model, the target radiation signals and received signals of receivers are represented by the accurate signals in the time domain, which improves the efficiency of this simulation model significantly. The visibility function is collected by the cross-correlation between I/Q signals of the antenna pairs just as the imaging process of the practical SAIR. Some characteristics (such as the coherence between targets, the resolution and no-aliasing FOV of SAIR and so on) are verified by the corresponding 1D and 2D simulation experiments, and the effectiveness of this imaging model is also tested by these simulation experiments. The simulation experiment results show that this model is an efficient, accurate imaging simulation model, and can be employed in the system design of near-field millimeter wave SAIR.