Concentric circular antenna array synthesis for side lobe suppression using moth flame optimization

This paper presents an accurate approach for Concentric Circular Antenna Array (CCAA) synthesis to improve the far-field radiation characteristics of the antenna using a meta-heuristic optimization technique called Moth Flame Optimization (MFO). The far-field radiation pattern improves with lower Side Lobe Level (SLL) which is essential for the reduction of interference in the entire side lobe regions. MFO algorithm is a recently proposed evolutionary algorithm which is applied to determine the optimum sets of current excitation weights and to find the optimal inter-element spacing between the array elements in the 3-rings structure of CCAA design. In this context, the design examples of two 3-ring CCAAs, one having the set of 4, 6, 8 elements and the other having the set of 8, 10, 12 elements, with and without centre element, are presented by optimizing the array parameters. The results obtained by using MFO algorithm based approach show a considerable improvement of SLL with respect to that of the uniform array pattern and those of the approaches reported in the recent literature.