Characteristic Mode Inspired Broadband Circularly Polarized Folded Transmitarray Antenna

Abstract

The circularly polarized (CP) antennas with high gains have gained growing interest due to their significant advantages, but the existing works usually suffer from narrow bandwidths. In this work, a novel circularly polarized folded transmitarray antenna (CPFTA) inspired by the characteristic mode analysis (CMA) method is proposed to achieve a broadband and high-gain CP radiation. The proposed CPFTA consists of a top-layer multifunctional metasurface (MTS), and a bottom-layer polarization conversion metasurface (PCM) integrated with a linearly polarized (LP) microstrip feed source. Enabled by the CMA, the unit cell etched with an asymmetric U-slot of the MTS is optimized to generate two pairs of CP modes to broaden the bandwidth of the CPFTA. Moreover, a modified broadband E-shaped LP microstrip antenna is integrated with the PCM, resulting in a compact profile. A CPFTA prototype is fabricated and characterized to verify the effectiveness of the design. The measured results show that the fabricated antenna could obtain an impedance bandwidth of 31.7%, a 3-dB axial ratio (AR) bandwidth of 36.5%, and a 3-dB gain bandwidth of 30.1% with a peak gain of 22.35 dBic at 9.55 GHz.