Exploring Metasurface-Based Beam-Steering Antenna Systems
Abstract
The overarching goal of this project is to investigate and demonstrate metasurface-based beamsteeringantenna systems with flexible responses, wide range of frequency coverage, and lowcost. The explosive development of communication systems in the past decade has imposedstringent design challenges for high-frequency circuits and systems. Especially, the Navy hasidentified the need to improve beam-steering systems with a wide bandwidth and reducedimplementation cost, and seeks to accomplish this without increasing the system payloadfootprint. The proposed project aims to address these issues by exploiting the new concepts ofmetasurfaces to achieve actively tunable beam-steering systems. In the proposed research, activemetasurface is employed as the functional unit cell to enable magnitude and phase tuning ofhigh-frequency signals. The resulting novel beam-steering systems can operate efficiently at thebroad frequency range from radio-frequency (RF)/microwave to millimeter-wave. The proposed project is realized through the fusion of wave and circuit theories. Specifically, itincludes the following three tasks and innovations: (1) active metasurfaces with the capability tomanipulate electromagnetic waves with electrically reconfigured magnitude and phase responseswill be designed. The proposed active metasurfaces will also be explored to realize frequencytuning; (2) novel metasurface-based beam-steering antenna systems will be investigated andimplemented. Analytical techniques will be applied to theoretically model the proposedmetasurfaces and beam-steering systems. We will also work on the fabrication andcharacterization of the designed devices and systems; (3) to further enhance the performance ofproposed systems, multi-band metasurface structures will be investigated to enable multi-bandoperations of the beam-steering systems. Issues such as loss compensation will be consideredduring the investigation. The proposed metasurface structures and beam-steering systems will beverified by experimental results and module demonstration. To the best of our knowledge, theproposed research is the first systematic effort aimed to realize metasurface-based beam-steeringsystems with a fully electronically-controlled tuning and flexible properties, covering a broadrange of operating frequencies.If successful, it is expected that the resulting metasurface-based beam-steering systems willrevolutionize current beam-steering antenna design and lead to next-generation highperformancebeam-steering antenna systems for various Naval applications (e.g. radar, sensing,communication, navigation). Moreover, the fundamental design concept and design theorydeveloped in this project can be applied to other metamaterial structures, leading to innovativedesigns that are to the interest of Navy.
Document Details
- Document Type
- DoD Grant Award
- Publication Date
- Jan 04, 2017
- Source ID
- N000141712008
Entities
People
- Hualiang Zhang
Organizations
- Office of Naval Research
- United States Navy
- University of Massachusetts