A two-step method for the low-sidelobe synthesis of uniform amplitude planar sparse arrays

A two-step method combining the algorithms of iterative Fourier transform (IFT) and differential evolution (DE), called IFT-DE, is proposed in this paper for the low sidelobe synthesis of a uniform amplitude planar sparse array (PSA). Firstly, the entire aperture of the array is divided into a set of square lattices that are spaced at half wavelength. Then the elements are forced to be located on the lattices through performing IFT, so that a planar thinned array (PTA) is formed across the aperture. Undoubtedly the interval between adjacent elements of the PTA is an integer multiple of half wavelength. In the second step, for each column of PTA the elements spaced greater than or equal to a wavelength are selected as the candidates whose locations need to be optimized by DE procedure, as long as the renewed inter-element spacing is not less than half wavelength. Consequently, a PSA with reduced sidelobe level may be obtained. According to the aforementioned selection rule, only a small part of elements that account for the total number need to be relocated, which denotes that the number of individual parameters waiting for optimizing by DE is decreased considerably, and thereby greatly accelerates the convergence speed of the algorithm. A set of synthesis experiments for PSA ranging from small to moderate size are presented to validate the effectiveness of the proposed method. © 2019, Electromagnetics Academy. All rights reserved.