Methodologies for Performance Enhancement of Onboard Radar and It s Characterization Equipment

Abstract

newline Radar plays a major role in a multitude of application areas like surveillance, newlinebiomedical, automotive, navigation, weather, and weapon systems. These radars are newlinebased on ground, sea, and air. In this dissertation Methodologies for Performance newlineEnhancement of Onboard Radar and its Characterization Equipment are discussed. newlineTo radiate electromagnetic energy from radar, antennas are required. This thesis newlinepresents design and development methodology of choke-based slotted waveguide array newlineantennas. During the integration of slotted waveguide antennas to the aerospace platform, newlinesome observations were found. One such observation is the effect of the flange newlineon antenna radiation pattern performance. The Flange effect causes degradation of newlineantenna radiation pattern by creating a dip at the beam pointing angle and reduces newlinegain along that direction. The Side Lobe Level (SLL) is also degraded, degrading the newlineantenna performance and reducing the target detection capability. In this work, the newlinepossible origin of the flange effect is studied and efforts were put to eliminate this newlineeffect by applying RF Choke . This methodology improved the radiation pattern newlineperformance, Side Lobe level slotted waveguide antenna. newlineThe characterization of high-performance modern-day radars needs to be carried newlineout by using sophisticated Radar Target Simulators (RTS). The RTS needs to be able newlineto operate at wide bandwidths of the order of multiple Giga Hertz, the present-day newlineFPGAs work at hundreds of Mega Hertz, and it will be impractical with present-day newlinedigital processing technology. To circumvent the above issue digital parallelization newlinemethodology is applied for simulating targets for high bandwidth radars. newlineThe parametric simulation capability of the target simulator must be finer than newlinethe high-resolution radars. For improved range resolution, Fractional delay filterbased newlinemethodology, for higher velocity resolution multiphase DDFS-based methodology, newlinefor higher attenuation resolution digital attenuator-based methodologies are newlineproposed and