A 33 GHz Conformal Phased-Array Radar with Linearly Constrained Minimum Variance Digital Beamforming, Circular-...

A compact millimeter-wave radar system operating at 33 GHz is presented for integration on small unmanned aerial systems (UAS) and for ground-based counter-UAS reconnaissance. The design is specifically motivated by civil-sector agricultural applications, where large-payload crop-dusting and precision-spraying drones operating under FAA 14 CFR Part 137 require lightweight sense-and-avoid radar that conforms aerodynamically to existing aircraft or ground vehicles. The system is based on a 36-element hemispherical conformal phased array of crossed half-wave dipole radiators that generate right-hand circular polarization (RHCP) on transmit and selectively receives left-hand circular polarization (LHCP) echoes from targets, providing passive first-stage suppression of co-polarized rain and ground clutter. A Linearly Constrained Minimum Variance (LCMV) digital beamformer, applied to per-element analog-to-digital converter (ADC) outputs, delivers closed-form beam weights that enforce a distortionless response at each scan direction while globally minimizing sidelobe power. The formulation resolves the main-beam drift caused by the ill-conditioned re-scaling step in iterative Chebyshev tapering, achieving sidelobe levels below -20 dB with main-beam peaks within 0.1° of their commanded angles across all evaluated positions. Mutual coupling between array elements is modeled analytically using the induced-EMF method, yielding a 36×36 impedance matrix whose off-diagonal entries are at most 8.2% of the element self-impedance at the minimum inter-element separation of 2.70 λ. A closed-form decoupling matrix is applied to the receive manifold prior to LCMV weight computation. Seven simultaneous independent receive beams covering 0°-60° elevation are formed from a single data snapshot. A Scaled Conjugate Gradient neural network classifier, trained on radar-equation-scaled micro-Doppler features following Swerling I-IV radar cross-section (RCS) fluctuation statistics, achieves overall classification accuracy above 85% across five target classes. The five classes comprise two bird-signature classes (SW-I and SW-II), two UAV-signature classes (SW-III and SW-IV), and a clutter class. The design is entirely simulation-based; experimental validation using a sub-array prototype is identified as the primary direction for future work.