Robust Design and Tolerance Analysis of Shaped Reflector Antennas Based on Interval Analysis

This work presents an interval analysis (IA) based method for the tolerance analysis and robust design of shaped reflector antennas generating contour beams. First, the expression of the power pattern of the contour beam is properly defined in terms of the azimuth and elevation angles and the Cartesian IA (CIA) is then used to derive the lower and upper bounds of the corresponding interval function. The reliability of the proposed CIA tolerance method is analyzed through a set of representative numerical examples including random surface deformations of the reflector surface. Finally, the Particle Swarm Optimizer (PSO) is integrated with the CIA-based interval analysis method for the robust design of shaped reflector antennas. The robustness of the obtained solutions is validated against the results from analytic Monte Carlo simulations and the commercial solver GRASP.