Experimental study on robust supergain beamforming for conformal vector arrays

An experimental conformal array with vector sensors is designed and its supergain performance is studied in this paper. The robust supergain beamforming method is formulated as an optimization problem and it can be easily solved using the second-order cone programming. The manifold vector and the noise correlation matrix are both calculated using the real measured data which can alleviate the effects of the mismatches and make good use of the actual noise field information. The results show the robust supergain beamforming method possesses great potential for array gain enhancement and the sidelobe levels of the beampattern can be controlled properly which are superior to the conventional counterpart. Additionally, this supergain method can be implemented to arbitrary array (e.g. conformal vector array) with different channel response directivity, which shows good potential in practical engineering application.