Compatible Integration of Circularly Polarized Omnidirectional Metasurface Antenna With Solar Cells

Abstract

A low-profile circularly polarized (CP) omnidirectional metasurface antenna is developed and integrated with solar cells. The proposed metasurface consists of an array of 4 × 4 square rings. Square solar cells are mounted inside each square ring. Characteristic mode analysis (CMA) is used to analyze the modal behavior of the metasurface. The results demonstrate that the solar cells inside the square rings have a slight influence on the metasurface antenna. This arrangement not only enables total exposure of the solar cells to sunlight but also exhibits no degradation of performance of the antenna. Then, by using a proper feeding structure to excite the selected modes, the CP omnidirectional radiation pattern is realized. The proposed antenna, with and without solar cells, is fabricated and measured. The results demonstrate that the proposed antenna with and without solar cells realizes a similar impedance bandwidth and a similar CP bandwidth. Furthermore, the radiation efficiencies of the metasurface antennas with and without solar cells are similar.