Physical Design and Experimental Verification of a Huygens’ Metasurface Two-Lens System for Phased-Array Scan-Angle Enhancement

Abstract

Over the past decades, many radome designs to extend the angular scan range of phased-array antennas have been devised by utilizing dielectric materials and metamaterials. More recently, metasurface technology such as planar lenses and beam deflectors have been applied to phased arrays, enabling scan-angle enhancers to have a low profile. In this work, a physical Huygens’ metasurface (HMS) two-lens system for scan-angle doubling of a phased array is presented. For the HMS unit cells, the wire-loop topology is deployed to achieve high transmission for the required phase-angle shift. The proposed two-lens system is analyzed by full-wave simulations and experiments. The simulation results demonstrate that the scan angle doubles when the incident angle is below 15° in accordance to the design specification. Furthermore, the directivity degradation of the refracted beams by the two-HMS lenses is in good agreement with theory. Finally, a fabricated two-lens system with two $15\lambda $ long by $15\lambda $ wide metasurface lenses and a $16\times 16$ -element patch antenna array as a source is experimentally verified at ${\mathrm {10 \text {GHz}}}$ . The experimental results are in good agreement with the simulated results by showing angle-doubling performance with ±2° scan errors.

Keywords

• Phased arrays
• beam steering
• Huygens’ metasurface
• metasurface lens