Low‐Sidelobe Sparse Synthesis for Cylindrical Conformal Arrays With Mutual Coupling

A coupling‐aware sparse synthesis method is proposed for cylindrical conformal millimeter‐wave arrays. A semi‐empirical mutual‐coupling model, calibrated against Ansys HFSS over 93 096 element pairs, reproduces the coupling matrix with 0.94 dB root‐mean‐square error and yields a speedup relative to full‐wave analysis. The model is embedded in a hybrid GA–DE optimizer driven by a multi‐cut peak‐sidelobe‐level (PSLL) objective with circumferential and axial regularization. For a 432‐element 28 GHz cylinder thinned to 50%, the method attains a worst‐case PSLL of dB, 3.2–6.1 dB below GA/DE/PSO/SA, while preserving 68.4% aperture efficiency at only 1.2 dB directivity loss.