https://doi.org/10.1051/epjam/2016010
Research Article
Experimental demonstration of metamaterials application for mitigating scan blindness in phased array antennas
1
Department of Electrical and Electronical Engineering, Universidad Pública de Navarra, Campus Arrosadía, 31006
Pamplona, Spain
2
ONERA – The French Aerospace Lab, Toulouse, France
3
Institute of Smart Cities, Universidad Pública de Navarra, Campus Arrosadía, 31006
Pamplona, Spain
4
Fraunhofer Institute for High Frequency Physics and Radar Techniques FHR, Wachtberg, Germany
5
Thales Systèmes Aéroportés (TSA), Elancourt Cedex, France
6
Department of Information Engineering and Mathematics, University of Siena, Italy
7
TAFCO Metawireless S.L., Aizoáin, Spain
* e-mail: miguel.beruete@unavarra.es
Received:
10
April
2016
Accepted:
1
July
2016
Published online: 5 October 2016
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.
Key words: Phased array / Scan blindness / Metasurface / Metamaterial / Wire medium
© P. Rodríguez-Ulibarri et al., Published by EDP Sciences, 2016
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
