An Efficient Conformal Stacked Antenna Array Design and 3D-Beamforming for UAV and Space Vehicle Communications

In this paper, a new conformal array structure and beamforming technique are proposed to provide efficient communication performance for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and space vehicles. The proposed array is formed by conformally stacking cylindrical, conical, and concentric circular (CSC⁴) arrays which are all coaxially aligned with the same axis of the conformed body and with uniform interelement spacing. The array elements are then fed by a weighting vector that has an adaptive cosine tapered profile where the maximum amplitude coefficient is oriented with the mainlobe direction to improve the scanning capabilities of the array and increase the array effective area. In addition, for very large, conformed body structures such as space vehicles, a frontal mainlobe-oriented partial CSC⁴ array beamforming technique is proposed to efficiently utilize the large CSC⁴ structure, reduce the processing requirements for mainlobe electronic steering, and to provide very low sidelobe levels with reduced backlobe levels. Simulation results show that the proposed CSC⁴ design can provide wide scanning angles of up to ±70° angular range in the θ-direction with only ±1° change in the beamwidth, without increasing array size and with achievable sidelobe level of -45 dB and backlobe levels less than -10 dB.