Modeling and suppression of clutter for airborne fire control radar with conformal antennas array

Conformal antennas array (CAA) offer many advantages over conventional planar antennas array (PAA) such as less payload weight, larger effective aperture and increased field of view without mechanically canting or rotating the array. In this paper, airborne fire control radar (AFCR) with CAA is analyzed in terms of antennas modeling, working mechanism, subarray synthesis, clutter characteristics and clutter suppression method, etc. Firstly, the mathematics model and geometry configuration of AFCR with CAA are given, and the manners of subarray division and working are obtained based on the requirement for moved target detection of AFCR, and the pattern properties of CAA are analyzed. Secondly, the clutter spectrum distribution in space-time plane is analyzed. Finally, clutter suppression performance of existing space-time adaptive processing (STAP) techniques for practice is compared, and the minimum detectable velocity of AFCR with CAA is shown.