Synthesis of Amplitude Taper Beam Steered Linear Array of Conventional Amplitude Distribution Using Particle Swarm Optimization

In this paper, Side Lobe Level Reduction (SLL) and control of beam broadening in beam steered linear array of isotropic radiators with uniform inter-element spacing was investigated. As a solution to the problem of beam broadening with reduced SLL, a novel method was proposed modifying primarily the search space definition in Classical Particle Swarm Optimization (CPSO). In the proposed method, search space for CPSO was defined using different amplitude distributions, namely, Chebyshev distribution, Taylor one parameter distribution and Taylor Chebyshev error distribution. CPSO, with the information of where to search, finds the optimum excitation amplitude within defined search space for achieving both reduced SLL and narrow beam width. As an example, a 16-element linear array was considered to obtain both reduced SLL and beam width narrowing within the beam steering range. The results showed the effectiveness of the proposed method.