Deformation And Electrical Compensation Of Intelligent Skin Antenna

The antenna attached to the carrier surface is called conformal carrier antenna.The common carriers are aircraft,automobile,ship,high-speed rail and so on.The conformal carrier antenna combines the multi-functional RF aperture technology with the active electronic scanning phased array technology.Compared with the conformal carrier antenna,the smart skin antenna can respond to the changes of the external environment.Nowadays,with the rapid development of military technology,the requirement of radar is higher and higher.As a part of radar,the performance of antenna is also higher and higher.However,when this kind of carrier works,it will inevitably be affected by wind,high temperature,low temperature,vibration and other environment,which will lead to the deformation of the antenna structure and the offset of the position of the antenna array elements,resulting in the beam pointing offset,poor directivity,decreased gain and other problems,reducing the performance of the antenna,which is contrary to the development of modern military technology,Therefore,in this case,the optimization of array antenna is necessary.In recent years,fiber Bragg grating(FBG)strain sensors have been used to detect the strain of deformed structures,which can be used to reconstruct displacement information.Inspired by this,a new smart skin antenna structure with fiber Bragg grating strain sensor is proposed,which can achieve the purpose of antenna self calibration.This paper mainly introduces the principle of fiber Bragg grating strain sensor and a method of sensor arrangement.This method can reconstruct the displacement information of antenna by arranging as few fiber Bragg grating strain sensors as possible,and make the error between the reconstructed displacement information and the measured one as small as possible.This paper introduces the method of electric compensation.Combined with the structure of conformal array antenna,an 8 by 8microstrip antenna array with unit center frequency of 9.74 GHz and bandwidth of more than 1GHz is designed.The microstrip antenna array is used to verify whether the electric compensation principle can optimize the radiation pattern after the performance is reduced.Finally,the experimental results show that the electric compensation method can be used to compensate the pattern deterioration caused by antenna deformation.In practice,the conformal array antenna is more difficult to test because of its large size.In order to achieve rapid measurement,this paper designs a software,which synthesizes sum and difference beam pattern from unit test data,and makes parameter statistics and judgment on antenna array and unit pattern,so that a certain type of phased array can meet various performance requirements.The software realizes the following functions: the software can read the amplitude and phase of all cell patterns and correct them automatically;The synthetic array pattern of the antenna unit can form sum and difference beams,and automatically send out the pattern test reports of different combinations according to the needs.