| Sensor arrays have been used widely in applications including radar, sonar, seismology, biomedicine, communications, and imaging. A very popular type of sensor array is circular array, which has almost invariant array pattern in azimuthal plane. This dissertation considers beamformer design and direction finding for a broadband source using concentric ring array (CRA) that contains many concentric rings of different radii. The multi-ring structure of a CRA has several advantages including the flexibility in array pattern synthesis and adaptive array design.;We first proposed three CRA array pattern synthesis techniques, which can be used to control the sidelobe and/or mainlobe width of the array pattern of a deterministic broadband beamformer. We then proposed a flexible partially adaptive broadband beamformer design based on element-space approach. Finally, we proposed an efficient direction finding technique for broadband source using CRA. The proposed design techniques are corroborated by experiments from simulated as well as measured data. |
