2-D Circularly Polarized Printed Metasurface Leaky-Wave Antennas on a Conformal Aperture

A design methodology for 2-D circularly polarized conformal printed leaky-wave antennas on a grounded dielectric substrate is presented. Via forward projection from a given planar aperture field associated with the desired target radiation pattern in a hypothetical plane, tangential fields on a curved aperture are derived. TM-polarized auxiliary surface waves are introduced and optimized to make the penetrable surface lossless and passive. To realize the resulting tensor surface impedance distribution, an array of printed Jerusalem crosses with tilted arms is adopted. An example antenna on a cylinder of a 13.108-wavelength radius is designed and numerically validated for uniform-aperture broadside radiation in left-handed circular polarization.