Design of Full Scanning Miniaturized Antenna Using Left Handed Materials

An improved version of full scanning antenna using Left Handed Metamaterial (LHM) is reported in this paper. The antenna profile is designed based on microstrip technology using balanced composite right left handed transmission lines (CRLH TL) approach. Conventional LC network representation of the CRLH TL uses cascaded combination of inter digital capacitor (IDC) in series and vias to the ground plane at the stub ends in shunt, whereas in this article the design of full scanning antenna using WBIDC is reported and its performance is compared with conventional IDC based full scanning antenna. Use of WBIDC improves high frequency performance of antenna by reducing undesired resonances at lower frequency end. A simple technique is also used to miniaturize the proposed antenna profile. Dispersion diagram of the balanced CRLH TL based dominant mode leaky wave antenna (LWA) shows the capability of backfire (-90°<; e <;0°) to broadside (e = 0°) and to endfire (0°<; e <;90°) scanning. Radiation patterns confirm the full scanability of the antenna and it also shows the designed structure has reduced sidelobes in the endfire radiations. The return loss characteristic of the reported antenna structure shows an increase in the antenna´s operational bandwidth. The frequency parameter and performance of the antenna are evaluated by full-wave electromagnetic simulator using Ansoft Designer and these parameters are verified by another full-wave electromagnetic simulator using IE3D.