A comparison among several techniques for finding defective elements in antenna arrays

In this work, several numerical and analytical techniques of fault diagnosis, that require the use of samples of the damaged radiation pattern, have been tested and compared. Firstly, we show that the Woodward-Lawson technique is useful to locate the faulty elements, by calculating the excitations of the defective array with the use of samples at appropriate far field angular positions. On the other hand, numerical methods, such as genetic algorithms, neural networks and Case-Based Reasoning (CBR) systems, have been implemented to achieve directly the configuration of defective elements.

keywords: Linear arrays, array diagnostics, Woodward-Lawson method, genetic algorithms, neural networks, casebased reasoning