Overlapped Phased Array Antenna for Avalanche Radar

摘要

Snow avalanche is a natural phenomenon, which annually causes infrastructure damage and leads to human casualties in many countries all over the world. As a result, a detailed hazard mapping is required to be able to understand the avalanche risk levels. Also, the scarcity of the areas suitable for constructing infrastructures in the mountains places a high premium on providing high precision hazard mapping. This paper presents the design and development of an advanced phased array antenna for an FMCW radar to produce a high resolution image of snow avalanche in range and cross-range. The proposed antenna is a 16-element fully populated phased array with ±14° azimuth beamwidth and ±22.5° fixed elevation angle. The designed phased array antenna has 14.4 dBi gain and −20.3 dB sidelobe level. In this design, subarraying overlapping technique has been used to eliminate undesirable grating lobes by means of spatial antialias filtering. A phased array power divider is proposed to allow tapering of the amplitude of the elements to achieve low sidelobe level.