Element excitation optimization for phased array fault diagnosis

ABSTRACT

We present techniques for solving the problem of detecting element failures in phased array antennas by using a combination of a single fixed probe and an optimization of element excitations using principles derived from compressive sensing. This departs significantly from conventional techniques where the excitations are held constant and probes are instead moved spatially to collect measurements. Doing so helps us to accomplish two objectives with regards to successful fault diagnosis. First, we achieve a reduction in the number of measurements required compared to the state of the art; this reduction is particularly significant in the case of high-noise measurements where existing methods fail. Second, our techniques solve the problem of fault diagnosis in the case of real valued measurements (i.e. intensity measurement along with phase detection instead of phase measurement), which leads to simpler measurement hardware. We use nonconvex optimization algorithms to generate numerical results in support of our conclusions.

Keywords:

• Compressive sensing
• antenna arrays
• fault diagnosis

Acknowledgements

The authors acknowledge useful discussions on array fault diagnosis with Rajat Vadiraj Dwaraknath, IIT Madras.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

K. P. Prajosh

K. P. Prajosh is currently pursuing the Ph.D. degree at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras, India. He received an M.Tech degree in RF & Microwave Engineering from the Indian Institute of Space Science and Technology, Thiruvananthapuram, India, and B.Tech degree in Electronics & Communication engineering from the University of Calicut, India. His research interests include inverse problems in electromagnetics and compressive sensing.

Uday K. Khankhoje

Uday K. Khankhoje is an Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras, India. He received a B.Tech. degree from the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, India, in 2005, an M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, USA, in 2010, all in Electrical Engineering. He was a Caltech Postdoctoral Scholar at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (NASA/Caltech) from 2011-2012, a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Department of Electrical Engineering at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, USA, from 2012–2013, and an Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, India from 2013-16. His research interests lie in the area of computational electromagnetics and its applications to remote sensing and inverse imaging.

Francesco Ferranti

Francesco Ferranti is an Associate Professor with the Microwave Department, Institut Mines-Télécom (IMT) Atlantique, Brest, France. His research interests include data-driven and model-driven modeling techniques, sampling techniques, design space exploration, uncertainty quantification, optimization, applied electromagnetics, behavioral modeling, microwave design and characterization.