Planar Soft Surfaces and Their Application to Mutual Coupling Reduction

This paper presents a numerical study of the behavior of a planar version of traditional soft surfaces. The application of these structures, although limited to one direction, can be enough for many applications where the directions along which the waves must be suppressed are clearly defined. The proposed soft surface is compact and its design is flexible due to the different parameters of the structure. This work analyzes the effects of all these parameters in both the position and size of the bandgap or stop band. Also a practical application to reduce mutual coupling in patch antennas is presented. The work is supported by experimental results.