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

Abstract

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.