Sea Clutter Modeling and Spectrum Analysis for Airframe Conformal Array

Conformal array has advantages of small aircraft load, small air friction and large effective aperture. When the airborne radar observes the land or sea, the echoes will be induced to influence the moving target detection. In view of the advantages of the conformal array, the sea clutter model and suppression for airframe conformal radar are first studied in this paper. The spatial steer vector of conformal array and sea clutter decorrelation matrix are used to model the conformal array sea clutter echoes. The eigen spectrum and space-time spectrum under different sea states show that conformal array non-linear structure has a large influence on the clutter spectrum. At the same time, an effective gain weight is proposed to decrease the broadening of the sea clutter spectrum to improve the moving target detection performance. The simulation results demonstrate the good sea clutter suppression performance for airframe conformal array.