Comparative Study of Circular and Hexagonal Antenna Array Synthesis using Improved Particle Swarm Optimization

This paper describes the comparison of the performance of Circular array (CA) and Hexagonal Array (HA) of uniformly excited isotropic antennas which can generate directive beam with minimum relative Side Lobe Level (SLL). The Improved Particle Swarm Optimization (IPSO) method, which represents a novel approach for optimization problems in electromagnetic, is used in the optimization process. Two examples has been presented and solved. In first example, the IPSO is used to determine an optimal set of 'ON-OFF' elements in an 12 element thinned array, and in second example, IPSO is used to determine an optimal set of amplitude distributions in an 18 element array that provide a radiation pattern with maximum SLL reduction. This paper is basically concerned with the comparison of the performance of thinned CA and HA in terms of SLL by fixing the other array design variable. Numerical results for synthesizing two different array geometries demonstrated the superiority of Hexagonal Array over the Circular Array for both the examples. (C) 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.