Design of Antenna Array Architecture with Large Inter Element Spacing and Low Grating Lobes

To detect and track objects at longer ranges, phased arrays with large power aperture product is required. As large phased arrays are very expensive to develop, install and operate in the field. Therefore large phased array needs to be designed with reduced number of active elements for reduction of cost but at the same time it meets the system performance requirements. To meet the above requirements, in this paper we propose an antenna array architecture with inter element spacing larger than wavelength with low grating lobe levels. In addition we propose an optimization algorithm for designing the above antenna array architecture with reduced grating lobes. Numerical simulation results are provided to demonstrate the performance of the proposed antenna array for various scanning directions