Beamforming for Phased Arrays on Vibrating Apertures

A beamforming approach for phased arrays on vibrating apertures is proposed. The essence is to dynamically calibrate the antenna element position errors due to aperture vibrations. This is achieved by estimating element positions through the aid of a few near field reference sources attached to the antenna. The reference sources need to be mounted on rigid frames and be impervious to vibrations. The estimated position information is then substituted into the beamforming process to correct the distorted pattern of the antenna array. To validate the proposed concept, a 5.8 GHz eight-element array with artificially displaced element positions is built to emulate the vibration effect. The proposed calibration approach gives, a close estimate of position errors with deviations under 4% of the free space wavelength. Based on the estimated information, an array pattern with desired features is constructed