An Aperture Synthesis Technique for Cylindrical Printed Lens/Transmitarray Antennas with Shaped Beams

Abstract

Printed lens antennas offer the possibility of realizing shaped beam patterns using no more complexity than is required for pencil beam patterns. Shaped beam patterns can be obtained by appropriately determining the complex transmission coefficient required for each cell (or element) of the printed lens, taking into account the varying feed field over the input surface of the lens. Certain ranges of transmission coefficient amplitude and phase are undesirable (eg. too low an amplitude implies a large reflection at the lens input surface). It would be preferable to constrain the range of values that the transmission coefficient can take as an integral part of the lens synthesis procedure, and thus the transmission coefficient itself needs to be the synthesis variable. In this thesis a synthesis technique for doing this is developed based on the method of generalized projections, modified to “operate” in the space of transmission coefficients. This makes it possible to immediately perceive what influence constraints on the actual transmission coefficients have on the possible radiation pattern performance. In addition, an approach that allows one to constrain the transmission coefficient to values that must be selected from an available database of transmission coefficients is incorporated into the synthesis technique.