An Efficient Beam Synthesis Method With Coupling Compensation in Wideband Tightly Coupled Arrays

Wideband tightly coupled arrays (WTCAs) are essential components of modern advanced communication systems. However, the inevitable mutual coupling will lead to severe beam deterioration problems and heavy computational costs. This article introduces a notable and efficient beam synthesis methodology for WTCAs with coupling characterization and compensation. Specifically, the mutual coupling is represented by the modal excitation coefficients (MECs) via the generalized mutual impedance, which is efficiently obtained by the proposed full-wave partial element equivalent circuit method within a wide frequency band. Notably, this hybrid method demonstrates robustness in achieving beampattern calculation compared to traditional full-wave analysis methods. Subsequently, the modified excitation factor (MEF) is proposed to compensate the beampattern deterioration caused by coupling. Furthermore, a frequency-dependent tandem architecture is employed to enable real-time beam synthesis for WTCAs. Based on the MEF and tandem architecture, the proposed methodology shows excellent performance to address the challenges of beam deterioration and real-time beam synthesis. Finally, the versatility and efficiency of the proposed framework are comprehensively demonstrated through some numerical examples.