High-efficiency dual-polarized broadband reflecting metasurface using continuous polarization conversion technique and element with multi degree of freedom

Abstract

AbstractIn this study, two effective approaches are combined which are implemented at the element design level and system design level to simultaneously improve the frequency bandwidth and aperture efficiency of a dual-polarized single-layer reflecting metasurface. At the element design level, a broadband behavior is realized by using the polarization conversion technique (PCT) which is a novel technique to enhance the bandwidth of the element. To this end, an anisotropic metasurface with the I-shaped metal patch is proposed for rotating the polarization of the wave emitted from a point source by 90$$^{\circ }$$ ∘ and making a continuous phase shift in a full range of 360$$^{\circ }$$ ∘ within 8-18 GHz. Therefore, a completely equiphase aperture is achieved leading to enhancing the metasurface performance such as directivity and aperture efficiency and reducing the sidelobe level compared to reflecting metasurface developed by 1-bit phase quantization technique. At the system design level, the three-frequency phase synthesis (TFPS) method, which is based on determining the best constant reference phase for the aperture, is used and the corresponding constant reference phases are optimized to minimize the phase error in the whole band. The combination of TFPS and PCT enhances the effectiveness of the TFPS method considerably. An 841 element reflecting metasurface with aperture dimensions of 290 cm $$\times $$ × 290 cm is designed, simulated, and fabricated in Ku-band to verify the concept. The measurement results show that the 1-dB gain bandwidth before and after combining PCT and TFPS techniques are 17.47% (14.1–16.8 GHz) and 30.3% (14–19 GHz), respectively. In addition, the maximum aperture efficiency of the proposed metasurface is 63.62% which occurs at 14.5 GHz.