A Numerically Efficient Technique for the Analysis of Metamaterial- and Metasurface-based Antennas

Abstract

Metasurface-based antennas have received considerable recent attention in recent years because they are not only useful for designing new antennas, but for improving the performance of legacy designs as well. However, systematically designing these antennas is challenging because the antennas are usually multiscale in nature and they typically require a long time when simulated by using commercial solvers. In this work, we present a new approach for analyzing antennas that utilize Metasurfaces (MTSs) and Metamaterial (MTMs). The proposed method departs from the widely used technique based on an anisotropic impedance representation of the surface and relies on an equivalent medium approach instead. The principal advantage of the proposed approach is that such an equivalent medium representation can be conveniently inserted directly in commercial EM solvers, circumventing the need to develop special numerical EM simulation codes to handle metasurfaces. Several illustrative examples are presented in the paper to demonstrate the efficacy of the present approach when simulating MTS- and MTMbased antennas.