Beam-steering Vivaldi antenna based on partial Luneburg lens constructed with composite materials

Beam steering has found wide applications in many areas such as wireless communications, satellite communications, and intelligent transportation systems. Different approaches have been presented to achieve the beam steering, most of which, however, are complicated and expensive. In this paper, we propose a simple and efficient principle to realize this goal based on a partial Luneburg lens. In the experiment, a traditional Vivaldi antenna is used as the platform to test the principle, in which the partial Luneburg lens is constructed by drilled-holes dielectric composite material. The measurement results show that good beam-steering performance from -20 to 20 degrees in a broad bandwidth (8-11 GHz) has been achieved using the proposed method, and the antenna's gain and directivity have been significantly improved in the same bandwidth after using the special lens. (C) 2011 American Institute of Physics. [doi:10.1063/1.3651376]