Coherently Radiating Periodic Structures for Feeding Concentric Rings Array with Reduced Number of Phase Shifters

This paper presents the application of CORPS (coherently radiating periodic structures) for feeding CRA (concentric rings array) with a reduced number of phase shifters. The proposed design technique for the structure of concentric rings provides a better scanning capability with respect to other existing configurations. This design technique utilizes 2 × 3 or 4 × 7 CORPS networks depending on the configuration or the number of antenna elements in the phased array system. These CORPS networks are set strategically in the feeding network to provide several advantages with respect to others in the scanning capability and the reduction of the number of phase shifters of the array system. The contribution of this paper is the full antenna system design of phased CRA for analyzing scanning and the reduction of phase shifters. The proposed phased array reduces the number of phase shifter devices in CRA for a scanning range of ±25° in the elevation plane. Differential evolution (DE) was applied to optimize the amplitudes of the proposed system. Several design cases were analyzed using full-wave simulation results to verify the phased array model and to take mutual coupling into account. Full-wave simulation results provide radiation patterns with low SLL in all scanning directions. The proposed phased array was validated by experimental measurements of the full antenna system prototype.