Research At COMSATS

Microwave and Antenna Research Group

1. Design And Development Of Conformal Beamforming Array (CBA) For Aerial Platform

In this project, we propose to work on the research and development of conformal beamforming array (CBA) that will be tested on a fuselage/wing portion of a small surveillance unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) or a commercial UAV model. The traditional design philosophy is to use a planar array with the required performance and warp the array to fit the constraints with little to no consideration of the change in inter element coupling and underlying performance. The proposed CBA can also be used in passive radar for the detection of low flying objects and will be able to perform beam-steering and null-steering simultaneously.

The proposed CBA system will be scalable (both in terms of frequency, and size of the conformal array), having adaptive beamforming capabilities (without human intervention), efficient and will be designed specifically for aerial platform structures. Moreover, the CBA developed can be used in many commercial/defense applications, for example,

1) On the skin of an automobile for safe driving through alert messages/automatic brakes control using its beamforming capability,

2) On a cellular base station to increase the network coverage/capacity,

3) Access points in a broadband networks to achieve higher date rates,

4) Body area networks, and

5) Data transmission clothing.

For further details vist: https://www.cuiatd.edu.pk/electrical-computer-engineering/research-project-cba/

Project Funding

Funding Body

Funds

National ICT R&D Fund Ministry Of Information Technology

12.49 Million Rupee

Project Members

Dr Irfan Ullah

2. Antenna Array Failure Correction For Phased-Array Radar

Phased-array radar units are used on various platforms of aircraft mainly for surveillance, target detection, and remote sensing applications. The most critical platform for placement of phased-array sensors is the fuselage portion of an aircraft for air-to-air communication (for example communication from aircraft to satellite) and ground-to-air communication (for example for target detection). The damage or failure of these array sensors during operation cannot be ruled out. Practical array sensors for phased-array radar suffer from element failures mainly caused by transmit-receive modules on-board aircraft. Depending on the severity of these element failures, the performance of phased-array radar can be degraded to a level of mission failure. The major effects are (1) radar beam broadening, which results in decreasing the resolution of target detection, (2) gain reduction, resulting in more transmit power requirements, which can significantly put burden on other subsystems of phased-array radar, (3) increase in sidelobe levels, which is alarming of jammer interference, and (4) displacement of nulls in the radar radiation pattern, which is highly undesired for interferer rejection. In a nutshell, the radar cannot detect the targets correctly. Therefore, devising a software solution to recover the correct radar beam (at least maintaining its gain, sidelobe level, and nulls steering) instead of hardware replacement of failed sensors is highly desired and most viable solution for phased-array radar, particularly for airborne phased-array radar.