Practical Design Considerations for Compact Array-Fed Huygens’ Dielectric Lens Antennas

Abstract

This paper presents a practical design consideration for the dielectric lens based on Huygens’ principle (HP) at a short distance (=λ0/2) from a feed antenna to overcome the limitation of the conventional design method. It is suggested that certain ranges of dielectric thickness values are not considered to exclude undesired resonant effects that hamper the effectiveness of Huygens’ lens which relies on phase shifting elements. In the proposed HP-based design method, phase distributions are captured at the target distance away from the feed array for the two cases of 2 × 2 and 1 × 4 array antennas and based on these, the proposed lens topology is designed to compensate the phase distributions for gain enhancement. A case study shows that the proposed HP-based design approach considering the actual phase information and undesired dielectric resonant phenomenology can achieve a gain enhancement of up to 5.34 dB compared to the conventional dielectric lens, depending on the feed array arrangement that can render circular or elliptic shapes of phase distributions for radiated fields.

Keywords

• dielectric lens
• lens antennas
• antenna arrays