Design of A Wideband Low-Profile Cylindrical Conformal Array Antenna With Flexible Beam Scanning Capability

In this paper, a wideband low-profile cylindrical conformal array antenna with flexible beam scanning capability is reported. The design consists of the semi-cylindrical band-pass array antenna and the semi-cylindrical band-stop array antenna, which are connected by radius of R = 31.8 (1.06λo) mm. Based on the frequency selective surface, the profile of band-pass and band-stop element is less than 0.15λo, meanwhile, both have the characteristic of easy to conformal. The band-pass element comprises top and bottom layer of square metallic patch and a middle layer of metallic square-ring slot, and its transmission loss is less than 0.9 dB within 8.0-12.0 GHz. The band-stop element consists of top and bottom square metallic patch, middle metallic square-ring slot loaded with square tube, and its reflection loss is below 1.5 dB within 8.0-12.0 GHz. And a wide-angle of 360° beams scanning is realized, by rotating the spatial position of scanning conformal array. Finally, the simulated results show that the proposed low-profile array antenna have the characteristics of wideband, low-loss, wide-angle beam scanning.