Theoretical design and analysis of wideband active hard electromagnetic surfaces using non-Foster circuit loaded anisotropic metasurfaces

Abstract

The electromagnetic (EM) hard surface which can both support transverse electric and transverse magnetic surface wave modes has the important ability to reduce the EM blockage of metallic obstacles. We propose a method to design an electrically thin hard surface with wide bandwidth by loading with non-Foster elements. The wideband hard surface composed of an anisotropic impedance coating can be considered as a kind of active metasurface. We develop a method to determine the values of the loading non-Foster circuit which can minimize the dispersion of the unit cells. For this method, we derive accurate values for the loading non-Foster elements through theoretical analysis. We also determine the fundamental limitations on the bandwidth due to stability requirements. To verify our theoretical design, we simulate the transmission performance between the two ports on opposite sides of a metallic rhombus-shaped obstacle coated with the non-Foster based metasurface. The simulated results show that the blockage has been largely reduced over a broad bandwidth from 0.2 GHz to 1.5 GHz. Finally, we provide a discussion on how the resistive part of the non-Foster circuit can affect the performance of the wideband hard surface coating.