High Aperture Efficiency Arced Conformal Array With Phasor Beam Steering Antenna

A phasor beam steering stacked patch antenna with abilities of both the amplitude and phase pattern reconfigurations is proposed and used for improving the aperture efficiency of arced conformal array. The phasor beam steering antenna is composed of two parasitic patches on the top integrated with four PIN diodes and a driven patch on the lower layer. By switching the bias states of the PIN diodes, the induced complex current of the top patch is alterable and the phasor beam steering can be delivered. Thus, in the conformal array design, the phase compensation can be realized by the phase pattern reconfiguration of the phasor beam steering antenna instead of the conventionally used phase delay lines. Meanwhile, the amplitude pattern reconfiguration of the phasor beam steering antenna can also be used for enhancing the contribution of side elements to the gain of axial beam. A four-element arced conformal array with the phasor beam steering antenna is designed and measured for verification. Both the simulated and measured results indicate that the realized gain of the proposed conformal array is 12.0 dBi, and the corresponding aperture efficiencies are improved up to 51.48%, which is better than the results of the arced conformal array with the phase compensation network.