Lattice Spacing Effect on Scan Loss for Bat-Wing Phased Array Antennas

摘要

Phased array antennas are becoming increasingly more important in communications and radar applications. In general, these arrays are designed to produce narrow directional beams with hemispherical coverage. From the system design perspective, a phased array antenna must be implemented using multiple co-located antenna panels to meet the gain requirement over the entire scan volume. In order to accomplish this technical objective, and yet at the same time minimize the total element count, a phased array system must be designed with an acceptable scan loss. Within this context, positive link margin is always available in the boresight direction; the challenge is to satisfy the above requirement at the crossover point between antenna panels, or at the edge of coverage. In this paper, a trade-off study between directivity and scan loss with respect to element spacing for a 64-element bat-wing phased array with a triangular lattice is carried out using a newly developed parallelized CFDTD code. Data on scan loss performance as a function of lattice spacing is presented.