Planar Phased Arrays With Irregular Tiling Techniques on Triangular Grids

The design of arbitrary-shaped planar phased arrays arranged on a triangular grid is explored through an innovative approach using uniformly fed tiles of various sizes and shapes, guided by graph theory principles. To meet user-defined constraints on the number of transmit/receive (T/R) modules and radiation pattern power masks, tile size and shape optimization is achieved using a genetic algorithm (GA) with a novel initialization technique. This method enables the synthesis of tiled arrays with tiles of arbitrary size and shape, catering to both low/medium-sized arrays and larger, computationally complex arrays. The proposed approach is validated through a series of representative numerical examples, including both ideal and realistic array models. Full-wave simulations are performed to demonstrate the effectiveness of the method, even when accounting for nonideal radiating elements, including the effects of mutual coupling, and deviations in tile beamforming network (BFN). Moreover, comparisons to alternative tiling architectures emphasize the advantages of arbitrary tiling for different polygonal apertures, surpassing the capabilities of traditional diamond and domino-tiling techniques.