In this work, a metaradome based on a fakir’s bed
of nails is designed and tested in order to suppress the blind
directions of a 100-element antenna array. The antenna is a
microstrip array designed to operate in X-band. The fakir’s bed
metamaterial-like was first approximated using analytical
formulas before a full-wave numerical optimization.
Experimental results are exposed and confronted to numerical
results. They show a significant reduction of the blind spot
subsequent to the metaradome addition.
This paper presents two metamaterial-inspired solutions to mitigate the scan blindness effects in a phased array antenna. In the first solution, portions of a bed of nails are introduced in the radome to prevent the excitation of surface waves. In the second solution, a superstrate metasurface is designed to synthesize a permittivity tensor optimized to achieve a wide angle impedance matching. In both approaches, the numerical simulations are successfully compared with measurements of a phased array antenna prototype with 100 elements. The wire medium-based solution reveals an effective way for reducing the blind-spot in a wide bandwidth, while the metaradome has been found less suitable for the same purpose.
