Optimization and Compensation Techniques for Reflector Antenna Designs

Shenheng Xu
Advisor: Yahya Rahmat-Samii

Thursday, March 5, 2009 at 1:00pm-3:00pm
Engr IV Room 53-135

Abstract:
Advanced reflector antenna applications demand more sophisticated techniques to meet the ever-increasingly stringent requirements on antenna performances. With the access to previously unimaginable computational resources, the particle swarm optimization (PSO), a global stochastic evolutionary algorithm, sheds some new light on the diffraction synthesis techniques for reflector antenna designs, where the optimization kernel is crucial to effectively and efficiently explore the complicated antenna parameters for an optimal solution. In this dissertation, PSO is successfully applied to array feed optimizations and shaped reflector designs. In particular, reflector surface distortion compensations are extensively investigated. Empowered by the PSO engine, array feed and shaped subreflector compensation techniques are revisited. A novel sub-reflectarray compensation technique is proposed, which presents some remarkable advantages compared with other approaches. Other interesting compensation techniques for reflector antenna designs, an integrated twin-horn feed for azimuth displacement compensation, beam squint compensation, and sub-reflectarrays for spherical phase aberration, are discussed as well.

Biography:
Shenheng Xu was born in Suzhou, Jiangsu, China. He received the B.S. and M.S. degrees with distinction in Electrical Engineering from Southeast University, Nanjing, China, in 2001 and 2004, respectively. He is currently working toward the Ph.D. degree at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).

He has been working in the Antenna Research, Analysis, and Measurement Laboratory at UCLA under the direction of Professor Yahya Rahmat-Samii since September 2004. His research interests include novel designs of reflector antennas for spacecraft applications, various compensation techniques for reflector antennas, and evolutionary algorithms for electromagnetic applications.