One-Sixteenth Spherical Homogeneous Dielectric Lens Antenna Using Partially Reflective Surface for Size Reduction and High-Gain Radiation

Size reduction of a 1/16 spherically sectoral homogeneous dielectric lens antenna is developed in this letter by integrating a planar partially reflective surface (PRS) to produce high-gain radiation. Such a PRS, optimized by a full-wave simulator and the geometrical optics (GO) ray tracing method, has replaced the external longitude portions of ground planes in the original sectoral lens antenna to make an aperture size of 11 × 15 cm
²
, which reduces the radius of the spherical dielectric lens by more than 33.3% (from 6 to 4 cm). The overall antenna length is reduced by 56% (from 15 to 6.59 cm). The PRS plate with a ground plane is designed by ray tracing to reach a relatively uniform field distribution on the PRS aperture for high-gain radiation. An antenna gain of 18.94 dBi has been achieved at 9 GHz from a sectoral lens fabricated by a 3-D printer using ABS (ε
_r
= 2.429) material. The design was well validated by both numerical simulations and measurements with good agreement.