A Bendable Wideband Dual-Polarization Conformal Phased-Array Antenna
Theng Huat Gan, Ankang Liu, Peng Tan, Jian Lu
Abstract
In this letter, we proposed a bendable wideband dual-polarization low-profile conformal phased-array antenna. The antenna element is an inverted-F fed stacked-patch antenna. It provides an active VSWR <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$< $</tex-math></inline-formula> 3 for 10.7–12.75 GHz in the principal planes. The proposed phased-array antenna employs a row modular architecture, which enables it to bend to a cylindrical geometry. Both the antenna aperture and the active components of the conformal phased-array antenna are considered for bending in this letter. A prototype conformal phased-array antenna with eight rows of four dual-polarization antenna element was fabricated, assembled, and measured. Wide-angle beam scanning is achieved by electronically scanning along the curved axis of the cylindrical conformal phased-array antenna. Moreover, there is no grating lobe when scanning down to 60°.