IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ANTENNAS AND PROPAGATION, VOL. 61, NO.

5, MAY 2013

Arrays of Concentric Rings of Elements: Synthesis of Pencil

Beams With and Without Allowance for Nonexcitation
Blockage
R. Eirey-Prez, J. A. Rodrguez-Gonzlez, F. J. Ares-Pena, and
G. Franceschetti

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II. METHOD
We consider arrays with quadrantal symmetry, consisting of concentric rings of elements. The rings are spaced a distance apart, and
the elements of each ring are equally spaced upon it. The -th ring
from the centre of the full circular array (i.e. an array lacking a central
elements and radius
. The posiwindow) has
tion of the -th element of its first quadrant is given by

AbstractPencil beams may be synthesized for arrays of concentric rings

of radiating elements by fitting the field pattern to that of a Taylor pattern
for a circular aperture of the same radius. Nonexcitation blockage suppresses inner rings. Here we examine whether this needs to be taken into
account in the synthesis procedure.
Index TermsAnnular arrays, antenna arrays, antenna radiation pattern synthesis.

I. INTRODUCTION
A problem that can arise in antenna engineering is the need to locate
the antenna around a central non-radiating zone, or window, a situation
referred to by Milligan as nonexcitation blockage [1]. If the window
and the outer contour of the antenna are both circular, the result is an
annular aperture. The main effects of the central window are to raise
side lobe levels, reduce gain and beamwidth, and shift nulls. The first
to minimize the elevation of side lobe levels in synthesizing radiation
patterns for annular apertures was Ludwig, who achieved a pencil beam
with low wide-angle side lobes by means of an excitation distribution
that tapered to zero at the edge of the blocking structure [2]. Soon afterwards, Sachidananda and Ramakrishna employed a simplex algorithm
to optimize the excitation of this kind of aperture for both sum and difference monopulse modes [3].
Although radiation patterns for annular arrays can doubtless be synthesized by appropriate adaptation of existing techniques for full circular arrays (see, for example, [4], or the indirect approaches via continuous aperture distributions of [5] and [6]), we know of no published
account of any such adaptation. This silence poses the question of
whether adaptation is absolutely necessary, or whether, on the contrary,
little is lost by simply suppressing the central part of a circular array
designed to radiate the desired pattern.
Here, we first present a simple direct, deterministic synthesis technique for arrays of concentric rings of elements required to produce a
given array pattern. We then report the results of applying this method
to the generation of Taylor-like pencil beams [7], [8] when there is
nonexcitation blockage, comparing the performance of blocked arrays
designed taking blockage into account with that of blocked arrays designed ignoring blockage.

Manuscript received May 24, 2012; revised November 20, 2012; accepted
January 17, 2013. Date of publication January 25, 2013; date of current version
May 01, 2013. This work was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Education
and Science under Project TEC2008-04485 and by the Xunta de Galicia under
Project 09TIC006206PR.
R. Eirey-Prez, J. A. Rodrguez-Gonzlez, and F. J. Ares-Pena are with the
Radiating Systems Group, Department of Applied Physics, Faculty of Physics,
University of Santiago de Compostela, 15782 Santiago de Compostela, Spain
(e-mail: raquel.eirey@usc.es; ja.rodriguez@usc.es; francisco.ares@usc.es).
G. Franceschetti is with the University Federico II of Napoli, Italy (e-mail:
gfrance@unina.it).
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this communication are available online at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TAP.2013.2242832

In keeping with the symmetry of the desired pencil beam, all the ele.
ments on ring have the same excitation
If central blockage involves the suppression of the innermost rings
of an
-ring full circular array, the field
generated by the
resulting annular array is given by

(1)
where as usual is the wavenumber and and are polar and azimuthal angles. Since the pattern is approximately -symmetric (the
suppression of the inner rings having eliminated the source of most deviation from -symmetry), (1) may be approximated by

(2)

For an array of the above kind, with inner rings removed, a radiation pattern similar to a circular Taylor pattern of given and max[7], [8] may be synthesized by first sampling
imum side lobe level
the Taylor pattern with respect to the polar angle , and then obtaining
by fitting (2) to the samples by least squares [9]. This procethe
dure takes central nonexcitation blockage into account and is referred
to in the following as the blockage-respecting procedure. In what follows, we compare its results with those obtained by the corresponding
are obtained by fitting
blockage-ignoring procedure, i.e. when the
and then ignoring (equivalently,
(2) for the full circular array
setting to zero) the excitations of the inner rings. The variables compared (calculated in each case for the blocked array, i.e. after setting
the excitations of the inner rings to zero) are the dynamic range ratio
, maximum side lobe level
, and directivity .
.
We present results for an array of 20 rings with separation
From each Taylor pattern used as template, 130 equispaced samples
. Only real excitations were
were taken over the range
considered, i.e. only arrays with all their elements in phase with each
other.
Pattern synthesis calculations were performed using MATLAB
R2009b on a desktop PC with a Core i7 processor running at 3.2 GHz.
III. NUMERICAL RESULTS
Figs. 1 and 2 show plots of
,
and
against the
number of missing inner rings when starting from Taylor patterns with

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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ANTENNAS AND PROPAGATION, VOL. 61, NO. 5, MAY 2013

Fig. 1. Influence of the number of blocked inner rings, , on side lobe level, directivity and dynamic range ratio when starting from Taylor patterns with nomand
(P), 5 (Q), 7 (R). Circles
, blockage-reinal
, blockage-ignoring procedure.
specting procedure; triangles

nominal
s of 25 dB (Fig. 1) or 30 dB (Fig. 2) and values of
3, 5 or 7.
In general, regardless of the starting Taylor pattern, and regardless
of whether blockage was or was not taken into account in the synthesis
increased
procedure, increasing the blockage over the range
sigmoidally to between 12 and 11 dB. Blockage-respecting
syntheses achieved levels some 35 dB better than blockage-ignoring
syntheses over the linear part of the sigmoid.
, the directivity achieved
Over the same blockage range
by blockage-respecting synthesis fell linearly to about 2 dB below that
of the unblocked array, 35.035.5 dB. If blockage was ignored during
synthesis, directivity was essentially unaffected by removal of up to 5
or 6 rings, but then fell linearly to about 1 dB below that of the unblocked array.
fell
In the unblocked array, the dynamic range ratio
of the starting Taylor pattern
as increased and as the nominal
rose. When synthesis ignores blockage, blockage only affects the

Fig. 2. Influence of the number of blocked inner rings, , on side lobe level, directivity and dynamic range ratio when starting from Taylor patterns with nomand
(P), 5 (Q) or 7 (R). Circles
, blockage-reinal
, blockage-ignoring procedure.
specting procedure; triangles

dynamic range ratio if the extreme excitations of the unblocked

was in fact unaffected or
array lie in the blocked rings.
very slightly reduced when synthesis ignored blockage. By contrast,
showed
when synthesis took blockage into account,
increased, though this trend bore a
a marked rise and fall as
superimposed oscillation and the
peak decreased relative
to the corresponding blockage-ignoring curve, and shifted to higher
values, as increased and as the nominal
of the starting Taylor
pattern rose.
The above findings are borne out by Fig. 3, which shows plots
,
and
against for starting Taylor patterns
of
of
with nominal
s of 20, 25 and 30 dB. These
plots additionally illustrate the slight fall in directivity that occurs as
is lowered when blockage is taken into account
nominal Taylor
in the synthesis.
Computation times were short, 0.10.5 s, regardless of whether
blockage was respected or ignored in the synthesis procedure.

IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ANTENNAS AND PROPAGATION, VOL. 61, NO. 5, MAY 2013

2867

It is surprising that directivity and dynamic range ratio were not

only not significantly deteriorated by ignoring blockage but were
actually improved. Prompted by an anonymous reviewer, we wondered whether this apparent anomaly might also occur with other
synthesis techniques. As a step towards elucidation of this issue,
we compared the results of respecting and ignoring blockage in the
case of a technique consisting in first sampling the continuous Taylor
distribution and then subjecting the resulting discrete distribution to
stochastic optimization. The blockage-respecting variant of this technique consisted in sampling the Taylor distribution onto the complete
(unblocked) array, zeroing the blocked rings of elements, and then
optimizing the remaining excitations by simulated annealing (SA).
The blockage-ignoring variant consisted in sampling the Taylor distribution onto the complete array, optimizing this set of excitations
by SA, and then zeroing the inner rings. In both cases, the SA
cost function included terms for
, dynamic range ratio and directivity, and the weights of these terms were the same in both cases.
The differences between the results of the two variants were qualitatively the same as for the method described above in section II:
but worse
the blockage-respecting procedure afforded better
directivity and dynamic range ratio. These results were not significantly altered by increasing the number of equispaced elements in
the rings so as to maintain an approximately constant element density
throughout the array.
It is concluded that, for arrays with the geometry considered in this
communication, taking blockage into account when synthesizing a
pencil beam by the method of Section II is only worth while if the
resulting improvement in maximum side lobe level compensates for
the accompanying loss of directivity and increase in dynamic range
ratio (a case in point might be a radar application in which tight
control of side lobe level is required to avoid jamming). Otherwise, it
is preferable to synthesize the pattern for the full array (with no rings
omitted), even though the central rings will not in fact exist. It remains
to be seen to what extent this conclusion may be generalizable to
annular arrays that have other element arrangements or to synthesis
methods other than those considered here.

REFERENCES

Fig. 3. Influence of the number of blocked inner rings, , on side lobe level,
directivity and dynamic range ratio when starting from Taylor patterns with
and nominal
(P), 25 dB (Q) or 30 dB (R).
, blockage-respecting procedure; triangles
, blockage-ignoring
Circles
procedure.

IV. DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS

For antenna arrays with concentric ring geometry, the radiation
pattern fitted by least squares to a Taylor pattern for a circular aperture
of the same radius is similar to the starting Taylor pattern as regards
maximum side lobe level and directivity. Progressive omission of
inner rings (nonexcitation blockage) markedly raises the maximum
side lobe level and slightly reduces the directivity. Taking blockage
into account during the synthesis procedure results in slightly less
directivity and a somewhat lower maximum side lobe level than if
blockage is ignored and the pattern is synthesized without omission
of any rings of elements. The dynamic range ratio falls very slightly
with increasing blockage if blockage is ignored during synthesis,
and peaks at intermediate blockage values (omission of 57 element
rings, i.e. the inner 715% of the aperture), when blockage is taken
into account.

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