Efficient Ray- Tracing Approach to Analyze Arbitrarily Shaped Leaky-Wave Antennas Embedded in Lenses

This paper introduces a computationally efficient ray-tracing approach to study the radiation pattern of a leaky-wave antenna embedded in a lens with an arbitrary shape. The ray-tracing technique, based on geometrical optics, is used to calculate the phase and amplitude of the fields at the lens aperture, taking into account reflections due to the transition from the lens to the free space. To validate the results, the radiation patterns obtained in some examples are compared with full-wave simulations, demonstrating a considerable time reduction in the analysis of up to 99.6% in some cases.