Synthesizing Circularly Polarized Multi-Beam Planar Dipole Arrays With Sidelobe and Cross-Polarization Control by Two-Step Element Rotation and Phase Optimization

In this article, a novel method is presented to synthesize multi-beam circularly polarized (CP) patterns with sidelobe level (SLL) and cross-polarization level (XPL) suppression for planar dipole arrays by optimizing both element rotations and excitation phases. Multiple sets of excitation phases are adopted as optimization variables other than the determined values according to the rotation angles in the conventional sequentially rotated technique (SRT) and the random sequentially rotated technique (RSRT), so as to improve the performance of the obtained CP multi-beam patterns. This releases many more degrees of synthesis freedom but leads to a new problem of demanding excessive computation resources for a planar rotated dipole array with multiple CP patterns. Then, a two-step rotation and phase optimization strategy is proposed to effectively solve this optimization problem. In the initial step, the common element rotations and approximated excitation phases composed of the common phase parts plus the beam focusing phase parts are found for multiple desired CP patterns with different beam directions. And then, a refining step is performed to refine the excitation phases individually for each CP beam for improved pattern performance. Four representative examples of synthesizing multi-beam patterns with both SLL and XPL suppression are provided to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method. Comparisons with the conventional SRT and RSRT are also provided to show the superiority of the proposed method.