Synthesizing of concentric circular antenna arrays by using a combination of ant lion optimizer and sequential quadratic programming

Antenna array synthesis is quite a popular topic in electromagnetics and finding suitable array parameter values is a challenging nonlinear engineering problem in this field. In recent years, it has been realized that optimization algorithms can be used to achieve desired solutions in this area. Besides, improvements in the optimization algorithms make it possible to perform synthesis processes on different array structures and to obtain better results. In this paper, a method based on a combination of ant lion optimizer (ALO) and sequential quadratic programming (SQP) is proposed for the concentric circular antenna array (CCAA) synthesis. Excitation amplitudes of array elements are optimized for CCAAs with low maximum sidelobe level (MSL), narrow first null beamwidth (FNBW), and low dynamic range ratio (DRR). The results of proposed ALO-SQP method are compared with those of 11 different algorithms: ALO, moth flame optimizer (MFO), SQP, symbiotic organisms search (SOS), biogeography based optimization (BBO), opposition-based gravitational search algorithm (OGSA), cat swarm optimization (CSO), firefly algorithm (FA), evolutionary programming (EP), backtracking search optimization algorithm (BSA), and seeker optimization algorithm (SOA). The comparisons indicate that the CCAAs synthesis using the proposed method presents good MSLs, FNBWs, and DRRs.