An efficient successive projection method for the synthesis of phased array antennas to radiate contoured field patterns

An efficient procedure of successive projection method (SPM) [1],[2] is developed to synthesize the excitation weightings of a phased array antenna for a contoured pattern radiation. In contrast to the conventional approach, which uses the elemental radiations as field basis functions to synthesize the desired pattern, this work appears effective in the synthesis of contoured patterns with a narrow angular span. The advantages arise from a fact that conventional SPM needs to synthesize the excitations in an element-by-element fashion, and will have a large number of unknowns in terms of array elements because the radiation pattern of elemental antenna is very broad, covering the entire space. Instead, this paper introduces an additional intermediate step in the synthesis procedure, by constructing a new set of field basis functions with a nature of narrow beamwidth, and allows one to further improve its efficiency and increase the physical interpretation during the synthesis procedure. The techniques developed closed-forms formulations in the synthesis computation. Examples will be presented to demonstrate its feasibility and validity.