Design of a beam reconfigurable liquid crystal array antenna

Abstract

Liquid crystal is a tunable material, which has the characteristic of low loss in high frequency band, and its relative permittivity can be controlled by external voltage. This paper has proposed a 4×4 beam reconfigurable array antenna based on liquid crystal material in Ku-band. The array antenna is designed to be 40×40mm in size. Its scanning angle achieves ±30° at center frequency of 16GHz, while it reaches gain of 17.1dBi. The proposed antenna broadens the application of liquid crystal materials in microwave frequency band.