Height Reduced Concave Sector-Cut Spherical Conformal Phased Array Antenna Based on Distributed Aperture Synthesis

The conventional spherical conformal phased-array antenna (SPAA) has a wide beam coverage but suffers from a high profile due to its spherical conformal carrier. In this article, a low-profile conformal array antenna is modified from the conventional SPAA, which can be called the concave sector-cut spherical phased-array antenna (CSSPAA). A distributed aperture synthesis is employed to guarantee that the performance of the CSSPAA is close to that of the SPAA after reducing its height as much as possible. The CSSPAA’s height and the element’s half-power beamwidth (HPBW) are properly designed to minimize the blockage influence due to the special topology of the CSSPAA. A prototype CSSPAA with 48 elements is designed as an example, and the height of the CSSPAA is 43% lower than that of the SPAA with the similar performance in the hemispherical beam coverage. Both numerical and experimental results indicate the effectiveness of the developed method.