Position-only side lobe reduction of a uniformly excited elliptical antenna array using evolutionary algorithms

Abstract

This study deals with the design of elliptical antenna arrays for specific radiation property using three different evolutionary algorithms; namely, self-adaptive differential evolution method, biogeography based optimisation method and firefly algorithm. These methods are used to determine an optimum set of positions for uniformly excited elliptical antenna array (EAA) that provides a radiation pattern with optimum side lobe level reduction with the constraint of a fixed major lobe beamwidth. Three examples are investigated; 8, 12 and 20 elements EAAs using these evolutionary algorithms. The comparison shows that the design of non-uniform EAAs using evolutionary algorithms presents a good side lobe reduction in the radiation pattern for the optimised design. Furthermore, the BBO method shows somewhat better performance compared with the other two method. © The Institution of Engineering and Technology 2013.