An Efficient Method for Designing Subarrayed Phased Arrays With All-Azimuth Wide Beam-Scanning Range

The subarrayed phased arrays composed of the regular subarrays with asymmetrical internal feeding phases are attractive because of their low cost and low design complexity. However, due to the imperfect design of the internal feeding phases, they fail to achieve wide beam scanning ranges in all azimuth planes, resulting in obvious directivity drop in some azimuth planes. To achieve all-azimuth wide beam scanning range, the internal feeding phases should be optimally designed. To this end, a guiding theory and an efficient method are proposed. Compared with evolutionary algorithms without theoretical guidance, the proposed method can reduce the problem of pattern calculation from quasi-infinite dimension to one dimension, and thus reduce the optimization time from more than 4000 hours to 8 seconds. Thanks to its all-azimuth wide beam scanning range characteristics, the designed subarrayed phased array can expand the minimum beam scanning range by 14°, reduce the directivity drop between different azimuth planes by 1.7 dB, and increase the minimum directivity within the ±49° beam scanning range by 1.5 dB. Results and comparisons are reported and discussed to show the effectiveness, advantages, characteristics, applicability, and practical reliability of the proposed method.