Beamforming properties and design of the phased arrays in terms of irregular subarrays

Large phased arrays are often organised by subarrays given the current state of technology. The irregular subarray architecture, which can effectively mitigate the quantisation lobes, has received a renewed interest in recent years. Recent researches present some innovative particular irregular subarrays to provide practical means to eliminate the quantisation lobes using several (even only one) kinds of subarray. However, there is no single, neat theory of the irregularly partitioned array antennas in the literature. This study presents some derivations of the beamforming properties for arrays with arbitrary subarray partition to fill this gap. Derivations have led us to introduce a novel approach to assess the radiation properties which is useful for the systematic design of phased arrays. Numerical experiments are carried out to validate the authors´ derivations. Additionally, an elaborate example illustrates a design discipline for a limited-field-of-view array with polyomino-shaped subarrays.