A Perforated Dielectric Metasurface Using 3-D Printing for Aperture Antenna Performance Improvement

A simple and planar single-dielectric perforated metasurface is presented in this paper for performance improvement of conventional resonant cavity antennas (RCAs). The proposed metasurface performs phase transformation to make the non-uniform aperture phase nearly uniform by providing the necessary phase delays in different positions on top of the antenna aperture. Near-field phase transformation (NFPT) technique has been followed to design the proposed structure. The meta surface consists of unit cells that are made of dielectric material with air inclusion into it. All the cells are highly transmissive, and their transmission coefficient
$(\vert S_{21}\vert)$
is greater than -0.85 dB. The aperture efficiency of the RCA with the proposed metasurface is significantly improved to 77.9 %. The peak gain and 3-dB directivity bandwidth are improved by 4.6 dBi and 8.8%, respectively. The proposed phase correcting metasurface (PCM) can be easily fabricated using a commonly available 3-D printer and commercially available RF -graded PPREPERM TP20280 3-D printing filament to achieve the desired performance.