Continuous Beam Steering Realized by Tunable Ground in a Patch Antenna

Abstract

A continuously steerable patch antenna employing liquid metal is presented. The proposed antenna employs a novel tunable ground plane together with parasitic steering to steer the direction of the main beam. The tunable ground plane consists of a permanent region, made from copper, and two tunable regions formed from liquid metal. The liquid metal channels were fabricated using 3D printing technology. By continuously injecting liquid metal into channels, the proposed patch antenna can provide continuous beam steering from -30 to +30 in the elevation plane, while achieving low side lobe level performance combined with low scan loss performance. Such an approach has never been tried before and it is only possible due to the unique properties of liquid metal. To the best of the authors' knowledge, this is the first time that tunable ground plane has been used for a patch antenna to achieve continuous beam steering. The proposed antenna operates at 5.3 GHz. The antenna is fabricated and measured. Measurement results agree well with the simulation results and validate the effectiveness of the proposed beam steering technique. The proposed antenna has a measured gain of 8.1 dBi at 5.3 GHz and wide bandwidth performance. The tunable ground technique proposed in this work will find numerous applications within future wireless communications systems.INDEX TERMS 3D printing, beam scanning, continuous beam steering, liquid metal, microstrip patch antenna, pattern reconfiguration, wide scan angle.

Dual-Band Antenna on 3D-Printed Substrate for 2.4/5.8 GHz ISM-Band Applications

“…Many researchers have been employing the emergent 3D printing technology for prototyping antennas for the microwave range, from a few GHz up to THz [13], since this technology is suitable to obtain antenna designs with optimal gain, reduced size, multilayer geometries, beam steering, multibeam, low cross-polarization, wideband operation, and even multifunctional antennas with the ability to achieve frequency tuning, dual band, and polarization reconfiguration in only one device [14][15][16][17][18][19][20].…”