Design and Development of Printed Periodic Structures for Microwave Applications

Abstract

This thesis investigates various novel design approaches to develop miniaturized single layered frequency selective surface (FSS) based reflectors, absorbers and polarizer with stable frequency response. Miniaturization improves the performance of FSS by providing angular stability, polarization independence, conformal stability and delayed onset of grating lobes. However, the design of such miniaturized cell structures which enhance FSS performance is greatly challenging. Active research on achieving such features on single layered FSS is ongoing and various FSS structures have been reported. Our main objective is to introduce various design methodologies which can be implemented for the development of efficient and frequency scalable miniaturized FSS for several satellite and RADAR applications such as antenna sub-reflector, gain enhancer, electromagnetic shield, radio frequency absorber, RCS reduction, filter and polarizer. Based on the manufacturing technology used for FSS prototyping the thesis is broadly divided into two parts: (i) printed circuit board (PCB) and (ii) additive manufacturing (AM). Each FSS design involves detailed structural, parametric and circuit analysis along with experimental results for practical validation.