Realization of high-gain circularly polarized planar lens antenna with beam steering capability

This paper presents design of an integrated high-gain circularly polarized planar lens antenna aimed for beam steering applications at the Ku-band. The lens antenna consists of a phase gradient metasurface and a feed antenna. According to the principle of phase compensation, we can design three kinds of phase gradient metasurface with different phase distributions using the method of unit rotation. They not only achieve the functions of beam steering and polarization conversion, but also significantly improve the gain of the feed antenna. Through numerical simulation and analysis, we can see that the main beam can be deflected from the normal (or boresight) in a predictable direction. In the three different beam directions, the designed lens antennas are above 16.2 dB. The -10dB impedance bandwidth is approximately 950MHz and the axial ratio (AR) remains below 2 dB at 13GHz. The proposed lens antenna has the advantages of low cost, flatness and easy operation, so it has great potential in radar and wireless communication system.