Application of artificial magnetic conductor metasurface for optimum design of slotted waveguide array antenna

摘要

Application of artificial magnetic conductor (AMC) metasurfaces is introduced to improve the collinear-slotted waveguide array antenna performance. The AMC metasurfaces mounted at the waveguide side walls can modify the current distributions at the waveguide broad wall which results in modification of slot radiation. Two applications of the AMC metasurface in the slotted waveguide array are introduced: side lobe level (SLL) reduction and antenna compactness. In the low SLL case, using the AMC metasurfaces in the antenna structure results in 9 dB side lobe level reduction as well as 1.8 dB gain enhancement compared with the conventional 5-slotted array one while 24% compactness and 6 dB SLL reduction is obtained in the compact design case. The low SLL and compact antennas have 60 and 45 MHz bandwidth at X band, respectively. For demonstration of the idea, the low SLL case is fabricated and measured, which showed very good agreement with the simulation ones. The simplicity, compactness, flexibility, low cost, high gain and low SLL of the proposed antennas verify its ability and capability for many applications such as radar antenna.