Wideband Irregular Subarrayed Array Design Strategy With Minimum Module Quantity

This article presents a wideband irregular subarrayed design strategy with minimum module quantity, which decomposes the practical application problem into two subproblems according to the application scenarios and requirements. For the arrays tiled with irregular subarrays, we propose a wideband array partition method based on the principle that pattern matching is equivalent to excitation matching. The optimal module partition scheme is obtained by the K-means clustering method. Then, we propose a minimum module quantity estimation method to explore the relationship between the bandwidth and the number of modules. For modular array cases, we propose a wideband array hierarchical design strategy with minimum module quantity. The module partition model of the array with tiled module structure is solved by the weighted l(1)-norm convex relaxation iterative optimization method. Both the design methods are able to obtain the optimal module partition scheme with the minimum quantity of modules and maintain good radiation performance. The effectiveness and potential of the proposed methods are verified by various numerical examples.