Synthetic elements for moving line arrays

Beamformed line arrays are limited in frequency coverage by both the Nyquist rate imposed by temporal sampling and by the spatial separation of the individual sensors of the array. The spatial limitation, analogous to the Nyquist rate, is imposed by the necessity of adequately sampling the waveform in space in order to distinguish one arrival angle from another. A moving line array effectively samples the space more densely than a stationary array, and, thus, with an adequate temporal sampling rate, meets the sampling criterion for higher frequency coverage than does the stationary array. This paper explores methodology for exploiting array motion to process higher frequency regions at all steered directions in order to use the full frequency capability of the array.