Spatial Deconvolution Method for the Diagnosis of Conformal Array Antennas

The paper presents an effective fault-element detection method for conformal array antennas based on a spherical spatial deconvolution. To address the diagnosis issue caused by curved array surfaces, the proposed method extends two-dimensional planar spatial deconvolution to three-dimensional spherical spatial deconvolution via spherical integral transformation, making it well suited for spherical conformal array antennas. Since spatial convolution–deconvolution mathematically corresponds to multiplication and division operations in the wavenumber domain, spherical deconvolution can be readily implemented by combining matrix division and inverse fast Fourier transform. Notably, the size of the spatial deconvolution kernel is a critical parameter that affects the reconstruction accuracy and computational overhead of the entire diagnostic procedure. Numerical simulation and measurement results show that the proposed method achieves better accuracy in field inversion than the conventional spherical wave expansion method.