Heuristically Aided Design of Dual Band Shared Aperture Antenna Array

This paper presents the synthesis of a shared aperture antenna array operating over S and X bands. The antenna elements are PEC backed probe fed rectangular patch antennas with same thickness of the substrate for both the bands. The array are interspersed using array thinning technique utilizing invasive weed optimization technique and the inter-element spacing chosen is $\lambda / 2$ for both S and X bands. A $10 \times 10$ S-band array and a $30 \times 30 \mathrm{X}$-band array were thinned simultaneously to achieve peak side lobe levels less than −16 dB in both the bands while avoiding the overlapping of X-band patches over the S-band patches. The technique also inherently takes care of the physical patch dimensions as well. The proposed work is useful for phased array applications.