Design of Polarization Reconfigurable Antenna Using Metasurface

Abstract

A planar polarization-reconfigurable metasurfaced antenna (PRMS) designed using metasurface (MS) is proposed. The PRMS antenna consists of a planar MS placed atop of and in direct contact with a planar slot antenna, both having a circular shape with a diameter of 78 mm (0.9 <formula formulatype="inline" xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex Notation="TeX">$\lambda_{0}$</tex></formula> ), making it compact and low profile. By rotating the MS around the center with respect to the slot antenna, the PRMS antenna can be reconfigured to linear polarization, left-hand and right-hand circular polarizations. An equivalent circuit is used to explain the reconfigurability of the antenna. The PRMS antenna is studied and designed to operate at around 3.5 GHz using computer simulation. For verification of simulation results, the PRMS antenna is fabricated and measured. The antenna performance, in terms of polarization reconfigurability, axial-ratio bandwidth, impedance bandwidth, realized boresight gain and radiation pattern, is presented. Results show that the PRMS antenna in circular polarizations achieves an operating bandwidth of 3.3–3.7 GHz (i.e., fractional bandwidth 11.4%), a boresight gain of above 5 dBi and high-polarization isolation of larger than 15 dB. While the PRMS antenna in linear polarization achieves a gain of above 7.5 dBi with cross-polarization isolation larger than 50 dB.