| Advanced reflector antenna applications demand more sophisticated design techniques to meet the ever-increasingly stringent requirements on antenna performances. With the access to previously unimaginable computational resources, the particle swarm optimization (PSO), a global stochastic evolutionary algorithm, provides a new methodology for the diffraction synthesis techniques for reflector antenna designs, where the optimization kernel is crucial to effectively and efficiently explore the complicated antenna parameters for an optimal solution. In this dissertation, PSO is successfully applied to array feed optimizations and shaped reflector designs. In particular, the reflector surface distortion compensation is extensively investigated. Empowered by the PSO engine, array feed and shaped sub-reflector compensation techniques are revisited. A novel sub-reflectarray compensation technique is proposed, which presents some remarkable advantages compared with other approaches. Three other compensation techniques for reflector antenna designs, an integrated twin-horn feed for azimuth displacement compensation, beam squint compensation, and sub-reflectarrays for spherical aberration compensation, are discussed as well. |
