Conformal and Flexible Leaky-Wave Combline/Rampart Hybrid Antenna Arrays

Abstract

A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Affairs in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of MASTER OF APPLIED SCIENCE, M.A.SC.

Pattern Engineered Bi-Directional Leaky-Wave Antennas with Independent Beam-Scanning Laws

“…It was decided to use a thin PET sheet with a thickness of 250µm as the substrate for the design, due to its prior use in several flexible antenna designs [78,63,64,65]. Due to the antenna's thinness, via walls would be impossible to implement, meaning the LWA would need to use a microstrip line to propagate the wave modes.…”

“…Multiple methods of attaching conducting layers to a flexible substrate have been proposed, including the use of silver ink. However, such printing methods have low conductivity and thus higher dissipation losses, which made them unsuitable for these designs [78]. Instead, the top and bottom copper layers were fabricated separately on Kapton sheets, each with a stack-up consisting from the bottom-up of PET-Polyimide-copper-coverlay.…”