Synthesis of unequally spaced arrays by simulated annealing

Abstract

Simulated annealing is applied to the synthesis of arrays in order to reduce the peaks of side lobes by acting on the elements' positions and weight coefficients. In the case considered, the number of array elements and the spatial aperture of an unequally spaced array are a priori fixed. Thanks to the high flexibility of simulated annealing, the results obtained for a 25-element array over an aperture of 50/spl lambda/ improve those reported in the literature.