Extending the scanning angle of a phased array antenna by using a null-space medium

TL;DR

This paper proposes a novel null-space medium radome that extends the scanning angle of phased array antennas, using only two homogeneous materials, verified by numerical simulations.

Contribution

It introduces a null-space medium-based radome design that enables extended scanning angles with simple material layers.

Findings

Numerical simulations confirm the radome's effectiveness in extending scanning angles.

The radome design requires only two homogeneous materials.

The approach achieves a linear relationship between incident and output angles.

Abstract

By introducing a columnar null-space region as the reference space, we design a radome that can extend the scanning angle of a phased array antenna (PAA) by a predetermined relationship (e.g. a linear relationship between the incident angle and steered output angle can be achieved). After some approximation, we only need two homogeneous materials to construct the proposed radome layer by layer. This kind of medium is called a null-space medium, which has been studied and fabricated for realizing hyper-lenses and some other devices. Numerical simulations verify the performance of our radome.