Electro-Mechanical Beam Steering Modeling to Enhance the Scanning Range of UWB Vivaldi Antenna Array

This paper presents a simulation based far-field radiation beam steering model to increase the scanning range of a
$1\times 4$
Vivaldi antenna array operating at
$5.8-18+GHz$
. Along with the electrical beam steering method where phase difference is provided between the array elements, a novel mechanical tilting of the array elements is introduced. Different mechanical tilting is implemented by tilting the array elements along the elevation plane while maintaining a
$15^{\circ}$
tilt angle difference. The introduction of electro-mechanical steering increases the scanning range by 4.3 times while maintaining a unidirectional radiation pattern and 15.4
$dBi$
gain. Based on the simulated results, the electro-mechanical beam steering model when implemented on the proposed
$1\times 4$
Vivaldi antenna array is capable of achieving a
$\pm 52^{\circ}$
scanning range along the elevation plane with a 4.8 dB scanning loss.