Cloaking of Rectangular Patch Antenna Arrays with Coated Metasurfaces

The concept of electromagnetic cloaking is applied to eliminate the adverse effects of mutual coupling between the tightly spaced, interleaved rectangular patch arrays operating at C-band frequencies. We demonstrate that by coating the top surfaces of each patch antenna element with a suitably patterned metasurface, the elements appear to become electromagnetically invisible to each other. Particularly, the cloaking and decoupling effect is evaluated to enhance the functionality of the coupled arrays in terms of their realized gain and total efficiencies. Subsequently, the interleaved patch antenna arrays, even though placed in close proximity, can radiate independently as if they were isolated. The fact that these specifically designed metasurfaces achieve cloaking of an electrically large surface, makes our design unique in itself. The decoupling and cloaking action of the metasurfaces are demonstrated by various full-wave numerical simulation results.