Flat top coverage pattern maintaining via boundary subarray elements thinning

Abstract

This paper aims to study the effect of eliminating some elements from the original planar array (OPA) to generate a useful flat-top coverage pattern (FTCP) using a genetic algorithm. The study involves dividing the fully planar array (i.e., OPA) into two regions with an unequal number of elements. The first region includes the elements located in the core (center) of the array, and the remaining elements are the second region, and their location is within the boundary (side) of the array. Only the elements of the first region are included in the optimization process, while the elements of the second region are eliminated in the form of a specific geometric composition without affecting the FTCP generation. Comparing the OPA that N×M elements with the first region (active subarray) elements, it is noted that the number of elements has been reduced from N×M to (N − 2x) × (M − 2y) to reduce the complexity of the system as much as possible without affecting the performance in general. Different boundary subarray shapes are presented in this paper with different numbers of elements. The obtained results showed the effectiveness of the proposed method in generating FTCP close to its counterpart in the OPA.