A Novel Circular Array Structure and Particle Swarm Optimization in Aperture Synthesis Radiometers

A novel array configuration, circular lattice array (CLA), to generate uniform rectangular grid u-v coverage for aperture synthesis radiometers is introduced. Particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm is applied to finding optimal CLA configurations. To evaluate the advantages of the CLA over previously proposed circular arrays, a comparative study is carried out by analyzing the performance of the CLA in terms of both the number of samples in u-v coverage and the computation cost of the fitness function in optimization algorithm. The obtained optimization results for 5-30 elements are also presented.