Experimental demonstration of metamaterials application for mitigating scan blindness in phased array antennas

This paper presents two metamaterial-inspired solutions to mitigate the scan blindness effects in a phased array antenna. In the first solution, portions of a bed of nails are introduced in the radome to prevent the excitation of surface waves. In the second solution, a superstrate metasurface is designed to synthesize a permittivity tensor optimized to achieve a wide angle impedance matching. In both approaches, the numerical simulations are successfully compared with measurements of a phased array antenna prototype with 100 elements. The wire medium-based solution reveals an effective way for reducing the blind-spot in a wide bandwidth, while the metaradome has been found less suitable for the same purpose.