Frequency-invariant pattern synthesis of conformal array antenna with low cross-polarisation

Despite their potential and promising advantages over classical planar arrays, conformal arrays also present many challenges to the antenna designer, including varying element normal due to curvature, serious cross-polarisation effect, limited operational bandwidth and so on. A uniform method for the element polarised pattern transformation of arbitrary 3D conformal arrays is presented based on Euler rotation. A space-time-polarisation filter structure is proposed for the pattern synthesis of conformal array, in which the finite impulse response (FIR) filters assigned to every element are used to acquire the frequency-invariant array pattern and the element polarisation diversity in array global coordinates is used to depress the cross-polarisation level. The optimal weight vector is obtained by alternating projection method. The alternating projection method is a powerful and attractive method for the pattern synthesis in that it requires relatively smaller amount of computation burden and a wide variety of desirable constraints can be freely implemented in a -visible- way, which is usually impossible for other optimisation method. The pattern synthesis method proposed has established a unified frame for the frequency-invariant and low cross-polarisation pattern synthesis of conformal array. Simulation results are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness and behaviour of the proposed method.