A Polarization Compensation Method for Spherical Array Antenna

Compared with planar array antennas, conformal array antennas have many special characteristics. Spherical array antennas are a typical type of conformal array antenna, and in the design principle of spherical array antennas, it is necessary to compensate for the phase values induced by variations in the spatial polarization of array elements. If this part of compensation is not implemented, the phased array antenna cannot efficiently synthesize beams, which reduces the effectiveness of the array aperture and may even result in failure to operate normally in certain specific pointing directions. How to compensate for polarization-induced phase variations with high precision and across the entire airspace is an important task in antenna design. A method for polarization phase compensation of circularly polarized spherical array antennas is proposed in the paper. Different from the conventional static compensation method, the proposed method focuses on establishing the relative motion relationship model between each array element across the entire array and the virtual reference array element, and calculates the spatial circular polarization phase differences among all array elements through the motion relationship. As a universal solution featuring high precision and full spatial domain coverage, the proposed method can be employed as a general algorithm in the design of various spherical array antennas.