Element directivity compensation for beamforming a curved array

Conventional delay-and-sum beamforming employs element shading weights that are derived from linear aperture approximations. For many conformal arrays, the aperture of interest is not well approximated by the linear assumption. In this letter, an analytical method for approximating desired linear array beampattern characteristics on a conformal array is presented. The advantage of the method is that array designers can apply rules of thumb learned from linear arrays to conformal arrays without significant degradation in performance. Many of the limitations of using conventional beamforming on conformal array surfaces can be removed by applying the method.