Tolerance analysis of planar arrays through Minkowski-based interval analysis

The analysis of the effects on the radiation pattern caused by tolerances of the control points (i.e., amplitude and phase weights) of planar antenna arrays is addressed. A method based on the Interval Analysis (IA) is exploited to analytically compute the upper and lower bounds of the power pattern as a function of the maximum deviations of the control point values from the nominal/reference ones. Since planar arrays are usually composed by a large number of elements and control points, the classical arithmetic of intervals based on the Cartesian interval representation leads to an over-estimation of the pattern bounds. In this work, an innovative method exploiting the Minkowski sum is used which allows to obtain narrower bounds with respect to solutions already published in state-of-the-art. A set of representative results is reported to assess the effectiveness of the new IA-based tool.