Beam splitting of a novel triple-beam slot antenna array based on radial gap waveguide

Abstract

We present a phenomenon of beam splitting caused by asymmetric boundaries. We design and manufacture a novel triple-beam slot antenna array working at the X-band to verify this phenomenon and show its potential applications. The corporate-feed slot antenna is based on a radial ridge gap waveguide (RGW) power divider, and is excited by a central coaxial connector. To achieve good efficiency, a radial SMA–RGW transition structure is proposed. Six different symmetrical and asymmetrical triple-beam RGW slot antenna arrays are mentioned in this paper. Among them, two symmetrical and one asymmetrical triple-beam RGW slot antenna arrays are fabricated and measured, and the measured results have good agreement with full-wave simulations, demonstrating stable performance of the proposed antenna array. Compared with the traditional slot antenna array, the proposal is capable of generating any number of beams in theory, especially odd beams, and each beam can be individually designed. The proposed shared-aperture radial multi-beam antenna can achieve simultaneous multi-directional coverage. It can meet the needs of multi-target tracking and imaging in blind spot detection and collision warning scenarios of the vehicular radar system. It also has potential value for satisfyimg the need for large-scale users to be connected in the wide-area continuous coverage scenario of the fifth generation communication system.