A Novel Beam Scanning Antenna Based on Liquid Crystal

A novel beam scanning antenna based on liquid crystal is proposed. It is a conventional liquid crystal microstrip patch antenna with a row of shorting pins in the middle of E-plane. Owing to the introduction of shorting pins, this antenna can work at even mode and odd mode within the frequency band. The resonant frequency of even mode is lower than that of odd mode. Therefore, through choosing liquid crystal as its substrate, this antenna can alter its operation modes by varying the permittivity of liquid crystal. More importantly, beam scanning can be achieved since the radiation patterns of two modes are divergent. By using characteristic mode analysis method, an antenna model at Ka-band has been investigated. The simulation results show that the main beam can scan from -10 to broadside continuously at 28 GHz in E-plane.