Antenna Array Failure Correction for Phased-Array Radar

Collaborating organization

National Electronics Complex of Pakistan (NECOP), Islamabad

Funding Agency

Higher Education Commission of Pakistan via Project No. 14696

Executive Summary

Phased-array radar units are used on various platforms of aircraft mainly for surveillance, target detection, and remote sensing applications. The most critical platform for placement of phased-array sensors is the fuselage portion of an aircraft for air-to-air communication (for example communication from aircraft to satellite) and ground-to-air communication (for example for target detection). The damage or failure of these array sensors during operation cannot be ruled out. Practical array sensors for phased-array radar suffer from element failures mainly caused by transmit-receive modules on-board aircraft. Depending on the severity of these element failures, the performance of phased-array radar can be degraded to a level of mission failure. The major effects are (1) radar beam broadening, which results in decreasing the resolution of target detection, (2) gain reduction, resulting in more transmit power requirements, which can significantly put burden on other subsystems of phased-array radar, (3) increase in sidelobe levels, which is alarming of jammer interference, and (4) displacement of nulls in the radar radiation pattern, which is highly undesired for interferer rejection. In a nutshell, the radar cannot detect the targets correctly. Therefore, devising a software solution to recover the correct radar beam (at least maintaining its gain, sidelobe level, and nulls steering) instead of hardware replacement of failed sensors is highly desired and most viable solution for phased-array radar, particularly for airborne phased-array radar.