A Method for Elimination of Common Grating Lobes for Designing Optimum Periodic Sparse Arrays

We present analytic methods for designing optimum periodic sparse array schemes consisting of periodic transmit and receive sparse arrays with different periodicities. The purpose of this work is to minimize the number of active array elements while suppressing grating lobe levels below a certain desired level. For this purpose, the fundamental conditions for eliminating common grating lobes, ones that occur at the same position on transmit and receive, are derived for a general model of periodic sparse arrays. The proposed design methods are applied to the design of some optimum periodic sparse arrays, of which the results are demonstrated.