Mechanical Phase Error Correction of Active Phased Array Antennas Based on PSO Algorithm

Each Channel of the phased array antenna innately has the amplitude and phase errors. The effect of mechanical errors on the performance of the active phased array antennas is of great importance. In this paper two kinds of mechanical errors, namely, antenna structural distortions and random errors in element positions is studied and the relationship between the electromagnetic performance and the mechanical errors of the antenna is proposed. The mechanical errors can create phase errors and reduce the antenna performance, for instance the gain reduction, sidelobe level increase, and inaccurate beam direction. In order to enhance the performance of the antenna in the presence of mechanical errors, a phase compensation method for error correction using Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) is proposed. The simulation results show that the proposed method can greatly correct the phase errors and after correction the overall radiation pattern is recovered close to ideal radiation pattern without error.