An application of hybrid nature inspired computational technique to detect faulty element in array antenna

Detection of faulty antenna element in arrays is one of the hot area of research in the field of adaptive beamforming which has direct applications in radar, sonar, mobile communication etc. Due to element failure, the radiation pattern of array is damaged in terms of sidelobes levels, nulls depth and displacement of nulls from their original positions. In order, to correct the faulty pattern, first it is important to precisely detect the respective faulty antenna element. In this work, we introduce hybrid nature inspire technique based on harmony search and firefly algorithm (HS-FA) to detect the position of faulty element in arrays. The HS-FA has shown fairly good accuracy and fast convergence as compared to HS and FA alone. The performance criterion is based on cost function (fitness function) which defines an error between the degraded and estimated power patterns. The simulation results are carried out for Dolph Chebyshev array which consists of 30 elements.