Time-inversion technique based correction of complex radome radiation beam distortion

Abstract

In the electromagnetic wave radiated by radome, there often occur pointing angle deviation, beam distortion and other phenomena, due to the complex electromagnetic medium composition, special contour and complex working environments. For conventional optimization methods, harsh and complex situations increase its workload, especially in the case that the specific location parameter information is unknown. In this paper, a method with time-inversion technique for correcting the radiation beam distortion of the complex radome is proposed. With the time-inversionl method, the concrete parameters of different positions for the radome and the surrounding environment information are not necessary to be determined in advance. The derivation shows that the environmental information is eliminated adaptively by the conjugate convolution operation, and it is proved by numerical operation that the signal of maximum radiation gain in target angle is time-inversion signal. Then based on the adaptive focusing properties of time-inversion electromagnetic waves, a top wedge radome and an icing working radome are taken as the case study. The equal amplitude phase shifting serves as the control group to highlight the advantages of time-reversal. In the end, the results show that the radiation beam pointing error can be reduced from ±10° to ±0.9° within ±45° scanning range for the top wedge radome in C-band. And the annihilated main beam can be converged again for the radome in the icing state. In addition, all the improvements are in a broadband range, and the robustness of the entire radome system is enhanced by increasing target angle energy caused by the increasing the directionality of the array radiation and the narrowing the 3 dB beamwidth. This paper provides an effective method of analyzing the complex radomes and radio wave propagations in complex media.