Vortex Wave Radar Imaging with UCA and Phase Coded Waveform

The orbital angular momentum (OAM) beam has shown great prospects of radar applications, due to the OAM diversity characteristics. However, the radiation energy convergence is still a hard problem to be solved for radar target imaging in realistic scenario. In this paper, a novel OAM beam generation method is developed based on the uniform circular array (UCA) and phase coded waveform, which can collimate the beams with different OAM modes. Furthermore, the echo demodulation and the imaging methods are proposed to reconstruct the target profiles in the range and azimuth domain. Simulation results validate that the OAM -based radar imaging can achieve higher azimuth resolution than the conventional real aperture imaging. This work can advance the development of vortex wave radar technology and radar system.