Research on conformal phased array antenna pattern synthesis

Phased array antenna has many technical advantages: high power efficiency, shaped beam, fast tracking by electric scanning, high stealth performance. If the array elements distribute on the airframe surface, the shape of the array is the same as the airframe contour, then the array is a conformal phased array. Conformal phased array has many advantages compared to planar phased array: smaller volume, no effect to aerodynamic performance of aircrafts, wider scanning range. In a conformal array, antenna elements are not placed in one plane because of its conformal structure. So the array elements and array factors cannot be separated, and the polarization direction of each element is different from each other, which will cause severe cross-polarization component. A field vector synthesis method is used in this paper to analyze the pattern of conformal phased array antenna, which can avoid dealing with the array element and array factor. This method is suitable for conformal array of any shape. This method is verified by calculating the pattern of a conformal array of truncated cone shape.