Sidelobe Evaluation of Cardioid-Patterned Sensor Array

Due to the widespread use of sensor arrays, a great variety of design techniques have been developed, adjusting the excitation of the sensors and/or their positions. It has been observed that most of these techniques work under the assumption of invariance in the beampattern, in the sen (thetas) domain, of arrays formed by omnidirectional sensors. Therefore these design techniques are only defined for arrays pointing to broadside. As directional sensor arrays are highly used, invariance hypothesis is no longer valid. This paper studies the influence of using directional sensors in the array beampattern, to show if the effects caused on the pattern should be taken into account when designing such arrays.