Abstract In this paper, the application of conjugate gradient method in adaptive array beamforming is studied.The combination of temporal and spatial averaging for calculating the gradient improves the beamforming performance and releases the constfaint given by G.D.Mandyam(1997)that the number of elements must be twice larger than the number of signals.New forward and backward averaging(FB)method and multilayer FB structure are proposed which further improve the beamforming performance.Several simulation results are included for illustration and comparison.