New Concept Conformal Antennas Utilizing Metamaterial and Transformation Optics

Abstract

In this letter, we show by theoretical analysis and computer simulation that conformal antennas can be designed using metamaterial with inhomogeneous constitutive parameters by applying the electromagnetic coordinate transformation approach, which is the technique used to realize electromagnetic invisibility. We demonstrate that, a source of arbitrary shape and position in the free space can be replaced by an properly designed metamaterial coating with current distributed on the inner surface and would not be detected by outer observers, because the emission of the source can be controlled at will in this way. As examples, we design two conformal antennas by transforming a simple dipole antenna and a standard array antenna separately to illustrate the possible applications of this kind of transformation.