Abstract
This paper presents two metamaterial-inspired solutions to mitigate the scan blindness effects in a phased array antenna. In the first solution, portions of a bed of nails are introduced in the radome to prevent the excitation of surface waves. In the second solution, a superstrate metasurface is designed to synthesize a permittivity tensor optimized to achieve a wide angle impedance matching. In both approaches, the numerical simulations are successfully compared with measurements of a phased array antenna prototype with 100 elements. The wire medium-based solution reveals an effective way for reducing the blind-spot in a wide bandwidth, while the metaradome has been found less suitable for the same purpose.
Highlights
Phased-array antennas are widely used in radar applications due to their beam steering capability
The measurements were conducted in anechoic chambers and each element was connected to a VNA while the others were terminated with 50 X loads
Blue color lines are linked to the first prototype and wire medium metaradome and red color lines correspond to the second prototype and the WAIM metaradome (WAIMM)
Summary
Phased-array antennas are widely used in radar applications due to their beam steering capability. For this reason, this type of antennas has been the backbone of multiple radar systems since this topic took off in the 60 s of last century [1, 2]. Scan blindness is a well-known artifact present in large phased array antennas with large beam-scan ranges. It is manifested as a strong mismatch of the active impedance when the scan reaches a certain angle. This phenomenon has two different main causes, both due to the periodic nature of the geometry and to the linear phasing. The first one is the most common and happens when the first higher order Floquet (Bloch) mode of the periodic structure transits from evanescent
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