Non-uniformly Spaced Antenna Arrays with Overlapped Elements Constraint

In the literature, inter-element spacing antenna design methods have been widely discussed and presented as an alternative approach to element excitation amplitude and/or phase control methods that may be relied upon to achieve the required array pattern shapes. However, methods associated with non-uniformly distributed elements suffer from the element overlap problem, where some of the optimized element locations may overlap each other and cause changes in the overall array aperture length. Practically, these element overlaps cannot be implemented, due to the physical antenna element size, without omitting some of them. Consequently, the overall performance of the antenna array is degraded. Further, degradation may occur when considering phased arrays with scanned main beams. In this paper, we first illustrate the effect of the problem of overlapped element locations and then we propose two approaches based on the genetic algorithm to optimize non-uniformly spaced arrays with overlapped element locations, while simultaneously preserving the array’s directivity. To solve the problem of overlapping and to determine the physical array element size, the minimum element-spacing constraints are incorporated in a simple way in the proposed approaches. Thus, the time required to perform optimization-related computations is greatly reduced. Simulation results confirm the effectiveness of the two proposed solutions, where the probability of the elements overlapping has been reduced to zero under specific conditions related to the locations of the some of the elements, while the peak sidelobe levels were always kept below -15 dB and directivity was maintained, to the extent possible, at the level of that of standard uniformly spaced arrays.