SYNTHESIS OF LARGE PLANAR THINNED ARRAYS USING IWO-IFT ALGORITHM

The iterative Fourier technique (IFT) is a high efficiency method that was proposed in recent past for the synthesis of large planar thinned arrays with isotropic radiating elements. However, the selection mechanism of IFT cannot always include the most useful elements in the "turned ON" families, which make the method trap in some local minima. Therefore, in this paper, inspired by invasive weed optimization (IWO) algorithm, a developed version of the iterative Fourier technique (IFT), IWO-IFT, is proposed for thinning large planar arrays. In this new method, the initial weeds are produced by IFT, and are further perturbed by IWO through repeatedly reproduction, dispersion, and exclusion over search space to find better weeds. Numerical results for synthesizing different circular thinned arrays demonstrated the superiority of IWO-IFT over the IFT method.