The design of two-fold redundancy linear arrays in aperture synthesis radiometers

In order to maintain the reliability of the interferometric aperture synthesis radiometer systems, especially in the situation of antenna/receiver failure, two-fold redundancy linear arrays (TFRLAs) are proposed in this paper. The optimization model of TFRLAs is formulated to achieve the highest resolution in the sense of two-fold redundancy that ensures the coverage of given spatial frequency (or baseline) domain even when any one of the antenna elements is broken. And then we introduce Fireworks Algorithm (FWA) to solve this array design problem. Moreover, the performance of FWA, in terms of both optimization effect and computational cost, is evaluated by comparing that of a widely used swarm intelligence algorithm, named Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO). Numerical results are provided with respect to the number of antennas from 13 to 29 and shown that the fesibility and effectiveness of the presented method.