A numerical technique for calculating mutual impedance and element patterns of antenna arrays based on the characteristics of an isolated element

A numerical technique for calculating mutual impedance and element patterns of antenna arrays based on the characteristics of an isolated element is presented. The basis for this technique is the theory of minimum-scattering (MS) antennas and, in particular, the interpretation of the mutual impedance between two canonical minimum-scattering (CMS) antennas as the first term in a perturbation series of the mutual impedance of arbitrary antennas. For the computation of the mutual impedance via the CMS approximation this pattern must be continued analytically into the complex domain. However, numerical codes provide radiation patterns only for real observation angles. To overcome this problem, the numerically calculated patterns are expanded in terms of spherical modes and the computation over complex angles is carried out analytically. Numerical results for collinear and linear arrays of parallel electric dipole antennas and rectangular probe-fed patch antennas are presented and a comparison is made with direct calculations using the WIPL-D code. Results presented show the good agreement between the CMS approximation and the WIPL-D code.