Tolerance Analysis of Antenna Arrays Through Interval Arithmetic

An analytical method based on Interval Analysis (IA) is proposed to predict the impact of the manufacturing tolerances of the excitation amplitudes on the radiated array pattern. By expressing the array factor according to the rules of the Interval Arithmetic, the radiation features of the linear array are described in terms of intervals whose bounds are analytically determined as functions of the nominal value and the tolerances of the array amplitudes. A set of representative numerical experiments dealing with different radiated beams and linear array sizes is reported and discussed to point out the features and potentials of the proposed approach.