Fast and Optimal Design of a K-band Transmit-receive Active Antenna Array

An active-antenna array with 18 transmit elements and 18 receive elements is designed and fabricated. This T/R array can work at two different frequencies (19.5 GHz and 21.5 GHz) with multiple levels of isolation between the transmit and receive channels. A hybrid element-level vector finite element and adaptive multilevel fast multipole method (ELVFEM/AMLFMA) is applied to simulation the performance parameters of the array element and the full array fast. To obtained the maximum directivity of the array, the best distances of the T/R elements in the array are optimized by using the genetic algorithm (GE) combining with VFEM/AMLFMA. The design efficiency of the array is improved at a ratio of 30%. Finally the performance of the T/R array fabricated is measured in experiments and some good results are obtained.