An approach for low sidelobe beamforming in uniform concentric circular arrays

In this paper, a new tapered beamforming function for sidelobe reduction in the uniform concentric circular arrays (UCCA) is proposed. This technique is based on tapering the current amplitudes of the rings in the array, where all elements in an individual ring are weighted in amplitude by the same value and the weight values of different rings are determined by a function that has a normalized-gaussian probability density function variation. This novel tapering window is optimized in its parameters to have the lowest possible sidelobe level that may reach 43 dB below the main lobe and these optimum weights are found to be function of the number of elements of the innermost ring and the number of rings in the array. The proposed tapering window can be modified to compensate the gain reduction due to tapering when compared with the uniform feeding case.