Sunflower Array Antenna with Adjustable Density Taper

Abstract

A deterministic procedure to design a nonperiodic planar array radiating a rotationally symmetric pencil beam pattern with an adjustable sidelobe level is proposed. The elements positions are derived by modifying the peculiar locations of the sunflower seeds in such a way that the corresponding spatial density fits a Taylor amplitude tapering law which guarantees the pattern requirements in terms of beamwidth and sidelobe level. Different configurations, based on a Voronoi cell spatial tessellation of the radiative aperture, are presented, having as a benchmark the requirements for a typical multibeam satellite antenna.