Direction Finding for Conformal Array in the Presence of Array Perturbations

An effective direction finding method is proposed for conformal array in the presence of array perturbations. Several typical errors such as mutual coupling, gain-phase error and position error are considered at the same time. These errors are as the angularly dependent gain-phase error. To avoid the shadow effect of conformal array, the whole array and airspace is divided into several parts. And assistant sources are respectively set in different orientations to reconstruct the manifold of sub-arrays for the corresponding sub-airspaces, respectively. Segmented spatial spectrum is developed for the direction finding based on the reconstructed manifold. It can well estimate the DOAs for conformal array with serious errors, and the final simulations verify the effectiveness of the proposed method.