Optimal steering of a paraboloid antenna using piezoelectric actuators

The use of piezoelectric actuators to modify an antenna radiation pattern has been investigated recently. In this paper, a doubly curved paraboloid antenna of Lexan((R)) material is considered, and the optimal size, location, and field of the piezoelectric actuators are determined, for steering the radiation. The deformation induced by the piezoactuators is determined using a shell element modified for this purpose, and validated using extensive experiments on curved beams and shells with piezopatches. The genetic algorithm is used as the optimization tool. One of the contributions of this paper is a formulation of the optimization problem which reduces the computational effort significantly. A reasonable amount of steering with good beam quality is achieved.