Synthesis of Circular Array Antenna for Sidelobe Level and Aperture Size Control Using Flower Pollination Algorithm

Sidelobe level suppression is a major problem in circular array antenna (CAA) synthesis. Many conventional numerical techniques are proposed to achieve this which are time consuming and often fail to handle multimodal problems. In this paper, a method of circular array synthesis using nature inspired flower pollination algorithm (FPA) is proposed. The synthesis technique considered here adapts one and two degrees of freedom, namely, amplitude only and amplitude spacing. The effectiveness of the FPA is studied by comparing the results with genetic algorithm(GA) and uniform circular array antenna (UCAA) with uniform spacing. Also the effect of additional degree of freedom on the aperture size and the computational time is analyzed. A relative side lobe level (SLL) of -25 dB is achieved using the algorithm under both no beam scanning (0 degrees) and beam scanning (15 degrees) conditions for 20 and 40 elements of CAA.