Design of Parameter-Optimized Spiral Arrays with Ultra-Wideband Grating Lobe Suppression

Abstract

An effective method is presented to design the layout of spiral array with ultra-wideband (UWB) grating lobe suppression. In this method, the general array factor expression of spiral array is formulated. Then, the synthesis problem of spiral array layout is converted to an optimization problem of three geometric parameters: s, r and Δϕ. These parameters can determine the exact position of each element. The optimization problem is solved by particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm where the constraints of element spacing and array aperture are introduced. For different-sized spiral arrays, there are always only three variables that need to be optimized in the PSO algorithm, which allows the proposed method to handle the layout design of large-scale spiral arrays with UWB grating lobe suppression. Two examples with different synthesis requirements are conducted to verify the effectiveness and advantages of the proposed method.