A novel circularly polarized patch antenna with low radar cross section and high-gain

Abstract

A novel circularly polarized patch antenna, which can achieve low radar cross section (RCS) and high gain performance simultaneously, is designed on the basis of metamaterial superstrate. The novelty of the design is that this antenna can possess the absorbing characteristic and the partially reflective characteristic simultaneously in an integrated structure. The proposed superstrate is composed of two metallic layers with different periodic patterns on both sides of a dielectric substrate. Through constructing different metallic patterns on the two sides of the superstrate, the upper and bottom surfaces of the superstrate will have different transmission and reflection performances when illuminated by an incident plane wave. The low RCS characteristic is dependent on the upper surface, while the gain enhancement of the resonator antenna relies on the reflection coefficient of the bottom surface. The upper surface consisting of a periodic metallic square loop with four lumped resistances on the four sides of the loop is of low reflection and transmission, and the bottom surface composed of a metallic plane with periodic slots is of high reflection and low transmission. When the superstrate is located at approximately half a wavelength above the ground plane of the circularly polarized patch antenna, the upper surface will absorb most of the incident wave by converting the electromagnetic wave into heat as Ohm loss to reduce the antenna RCS, and the bottom surface will form a Fabry-Perot resonance cavity with the ground plane of the antenna to achieve high gain and high directivity by multiple reflections between the bottom surface and the ground plane. The measured results show that with using the superstrate, the relative axial ratio bandwidth of the circularly polarized patch antenna extends from 5.9% to 7.1%, and the high gain performance is achieved in the whole working frequency band, which can be enhanced by 6.61 dB at most. Meanwhile, the RCS of the proposed antenna is dramatically reduced in a wide angle range and a broad frequency band covering a range from 2 to 14 GHz. The measured results are in good agreement with the simulated ones, which further verifies the correctness and effectiveness of the proposed method.