Analysis of Highly Directive Cavity-Type Configurations Comprising of Low Profile Antennas Covered by Superstrates

Abstract

In this paper we present a technique for designing antenna/superstrate composites to produce enhanced directivities. As a first step, we study the underlying mechanism that governs the performance of theses antennas by studying the canonical problem of a line source in a rectangular waveguide. The above problem is solved by constructing the Green’s function corresponding to the line source in the rectangular guide, one of whose walls is partially reflecting, that is can leak electromagnetic energy into the space external to the guide. The Green’s function for this problem can be constructed by aggregating the multiple reflections from the two walls. Although the above model is only two-dimensional, we show that it can be used to predict the performance of antenna/superstrate composites. We demonstrate this by modeling several highly directive antennas and show that indeed the required characteristics of this type of antennas can be determined from the analysis of the cutoff behavior of the rectangular guide.