A subarray design method for low sidelobe levels

Partitioning large arrays into subarrays can reduce system cost. In this paper, we use identical subarrays to partition a large rectangular aperture. The periodical structure in a large array is broken down by changing the orientations of the subarrays. In each subarray, the element positions are optimized by particle swarm optimization (PSO) to obtain low sidelobe levels. In order to reduce the coupling among the elements, the minimum element distance measured in Euclidean space is restricted in the procedure of optimization. And a modified PSO is proposed to solve the optimization problem with this constraint. Better results can be obtained than the element distance constraint measured in Chebyshev space. This simple but efficient subarray design method is demonstrated through several numerical simulations. © 2020, Electromagnetics Academy. All rights reserved.