Luo Qingchun, Zhou Yantao, Qi Yihong, Ye Pu, de Paulis Francesco, Liu Lie
Department of Electrical and Information Engineering, Hunan University, Changsha 410082, China.
Frontier Academic Center, Pengcheng Laboratory, Shenzhen 518102, China.
Sensors (Basel). 2021 Dec 22;22(1):47. doi: 10.3390/s22010047.
The measurement of the phased array antenna (PAA) is completely different from the traditional antenna, due to its multi beam patterns. Usually, each beam pattern of the PAA needs a separate measurement, which makes the overall time extremely long. Thus, the traditional method can no longer meet the efficiency and cost requirements of new PAA measurement. In this paper, a pattern reconstruction method is proposed which significantly reduce the measurement time of multi-beam PAAs. With the known array element patterns (AEP) and theoretical weighted port excitation of the beams, any beam pattern can be predicted by measuring only a certain beam pattern, due to the element excitation coefficient (including the matching, mutual coupling, and manufacturing factors, etc.) of the specific PAA being calculated. The approach has low reconstruction error in term of beam pointing accuracy, side lobe, and co-polar and cross-polar patterns while being validated for large scanning range. Through theoretical derivation and experiments, the effectiveness of the method is verified, and the testing efficiency of the phased array antenna can be improved by 10 times or even more.
相控阵天线（PAA）的测量与传统天线完全不同，这是由于其具有多个波束方向图。通常，PAA的每个波束方向图都需要单独测量，这使得整体测量时间极长。因此，传统方法已无法满足新型PAA测量的效率和成本要求。本文提出了一种方向图重构方法，该方法可显著减少多波束PAA的测量时间。利用已知的阵列单元方向图（AEP）和波束的理论加权端口激励，由于可以计算特定PAA的单元激励系数（包括匹配、互耦和制造因素等），所以仅通过测量某一个波束方向图就能预测任何波束方向图。该方法在波束指向精度、旁瓣以及共极化和交叉极化方向图方面具有较低的重构误差，同时在大扫描范围内得到了验证。通过理论推导和实验，验证了该方法的有效性，相控阵天线的测试效率可提高10倍甚至更多。
