Reference-Free Fault Diagnosis and Corrected Field Prediction in a Planar Antenna Array

Most existing fault diagnosis methods in antenna arrays assume that a reference pattern of a fault-free array (healthy array) is available for fault detection. A reference-free diagnosis method is a topic of great practical interest since having a reference pattern can be cumbersome in some cases. We propose a technique for reference-free fault diagnosis in a planar antenna array incorporating mutual coupling that reconstructs unknown faulty elements using a fixed probe and compressive measurements. We solve this problem by building a method inspired by the low rank + sparse matrix completion problem. Excellent results for different numbers of faults at various signal-to-noise ratios are illustrated. Also, the radiation field of the original healthy array is accurately predicted at the location of the measuring probe without any reference model. We validated our method using full-wave simulation, taking dipole and patch antenna arrays. The results obtained show high accuracy.