Liquid Metasurface Antennas

Abstract

This paper describes a novel design of a fully reconfigurable modulated metasurface (MTS) antenna. Current proposed MTS antennas offer limited radiation pattern reconfiguration, which is a crucial design tuning capability for antennas compatible with next-generation communication systems. The proposed MTS antenna consists of individual cylindrical dielectric casings filled with a liquid material, mounted on a ground plane. The dielectric casings are arranged in a regular lattice inside of a circular domain. The proposed design uses additive manufacturing materials, such as ABS and PLA, allowing for rapid-prototyping and decreased production costs. The performance of the antenna has been verified by full-wave simulations, and will be fabricated and tested in the future for further verification.