Design and Experimental Study of a Coupled U and L-Shape Negative Index Metamaterial for Aircraft Navigation Applications

The aircraft collision avoidance system (ACAS) is a surveillance system required in all airplanes to ensure a safe flight. To locate the presence of any surrounding aircraft that may pose a threat, the ACAS sequentially scans the fixed sectors (0° to 90°, 90° to 180°, 180° to 270°, and 270° to 360°) for a specified duration. As a result, ACAS necessitates a highly directional multi-element antenna capable of spanning the whole 360° azimuth plane. Over the past decade, studies on the performance enhancement of ACAS antennas have become increasingly prevalent due to the numerous limitations of the typical ACAS antenna, which include poor gain (
$3.6dB$
), larger size (
$>\lambda$
), high side-lobe level (
$-7dB$
), challenges with beam tuning, etc. The main focus of this study is to improve the gain and bandwidth (BW) of an ACAS antenna using the notion of MTM, hence a novel U and L-shaped compact negative index MTM structure is developed. Because the ACAS antenna broadcasts the signal in the entire azimuth region, the proposed MTM should be competent to endure its double negative behavior for all incident angles; thus, the MTM cell is evaluated for different incident angles ranging from 0° to 360° in the azimuth plane with a 60° offset, and for all incident angles, the proposed design exhibits DNG behavior in the required frequency spectrum. The effective medium ratio (EMR) of 12.86 at 1.06GHz demonstrates the efficacy and compactness of the proposed design. The proposed MTM cell is expanded as a
$5\times 4$
array, and placed as a superstrate at a fixed distance from the proposed ACAS antenna, and the MTM-loaded antenna outperforms the conventional antenna in terms of overall gain by 2.09dB and BW by 27.2MHz. Further, for the experimental verification, the MTM cell and its array structures are fabricated, and in both designs, the fabricated results correspond well with the simulated results.