Two-stage reference-free fault diagnosis in phased array antennas

Fault diagnosis in an antenna array without any reference pattern is a new topic of interest, particularly for practical scenarios. We propose a two-stage fault diagnosis in phased array antennas without the need for information on fault-free arrays. In the first stage, we use low rank + sparse matrices recovery to separate electric fields and faulty elements of an antenna array. This allows us to obtain the approximate true electric fields of all elements in an antenna array, including mutual coupling effects. The field information serves as a reference for a healthy array in the second stage, eliminating the need to repeat the initial stage. This efficient method not only makes the fault diagnosis process entirely free from reference data but also enhances the efficiency of the second stage by using the approximate true field information as a reference.