Efficient Circular Array Synthesis with a Memetic Differential Evolution Algorithm

In this article, we introduce an improved optimization based technique for the synthesis of circular antenna array. The main objective is to achieve minimum side lobe levels, maximum directivity and null control for the non-uniform, planar circular antenna array. The design procedure utilizes an improved variant of a prominent and efficient metaheuristic algorithm of current interest, namely the Differential Evolution (DE). An efficient classical local search technique called Solis Wet’s algorithm is incorporated with the competitive Differential Evolution. While the competitive DE is used for the global exploration, Solis Wet’s algorithm is employed for local search. Combining the capability of both techniques the hybrid algorithm exhibits improved performance for circular array design problem. Three examples of circular array design problems are considered to illustrate the effectiveness of the hybrid algorithm cDESW (Competiteve Differential Evolution with Solis Wet’s technique). The design results obtained using cDESW has comfortably outperformed the results obtained by other state-of-theart metaheuristics like CLPSO, JADE. Received 18 November 2011, Accepted 5 February 2012, Scheduled 10 February 2012 * Corresponding author: Swagatam Das ([email protected]).