Radiation Pattern Synthesis of Radome-Enclosed Sparse Linear Arrays

Radiation pattern synthesis of sparse antenna arrays has always been a hot topic in antenna analysis and design. In engineering, sparse arrays can help reduce costs and have significant positive impacts. When considering the mutual coupling between elements, synthesizing the radiation pattern for sparse arrays becomes more complex, especially when taking into account of a radome. Considering the mutual coupling, the active element pattern (AEP) of each element of the sparse array is different, which will consume a lot of time if the full-wave simulation is used. In order to solve this problem, a method combining sub array approximation and simulated annealing (SA) is proposed to optimize the sparse position and radiation pattern of sparse array, which can greatly reduce the optimization time. The example of radome-enclosed sparse linear arrays validates the good performance of the proposed algorithm.