Antenas CRLH LWA basadas en guía de onda: análisis teórico y demostración experimental

Abstract

A novel composite right/left-handed leaky-wave antenna (CRLH LWA), based on periodically loaded parallel-plate waveguides (PPW) is presented. The loading is obtained by a rectangular grid of vertical wires and parallel slots etched in the upper metal plane of the PPW. A novel modal-based iterative circuit is proposed for the complete analysis and design of this type of antennas. The coupling between the antenna and freespace is rigourously modeled using a mode-matching technique, combined with the Floquet’s theorem. This provides a lossy dispersive CRLH unit-cell model, whose values are obtained using a quickly-convergent iterative algorithm. The proposed method is accurate, extremely fast and it takes into account the structure physical dimensions. A CRLH PPW LWA has been designed (without requiring any time consuming full-wave simulation), analyzed and fabricated using the proposed method. Very good agreement has been found between measurements and simulations, validating both, the antenna radiating phenomena and the proposed technique.