Session 2.8f Update: Flat GRIN Lens Multibeam Antennas for Aerial and Satellite Communications
Tracks
| Wednesday, November 13, 2024 |
| 4:00 PM - 5:00 PM |
| Swan Room |
Details
High-gain antennas are essential for ensuring reliable long-range wireless connections and are highly desired for air-to-ground, air-to-space, and satellite communications. However, their narrow beamwidths typically result in limited signal coverage. To solve this problem, multi-beam technology, with each beam targeting for a specific coverage, has gained significant interest and been investigated based on various antenna types. Meanwhile, this technology can enable independent and concurrent communications with multiple spatially distributed users, thus greatly enhancing the system efficiency and capacity. Notably, multi-beam flat gradient-index (GRIN) lenses represent a significant advancement in antenna technology that can offer wide bandwidths, high gains, wide spatial coverage, and easy implementation.
To date, most reported flat GRIN lenses can only radiate multiple beams in 1-D planes. Many of them have sacrificed the lens aperture efficiency in order to obtain a wide angular coverage of greater than ±40⁰. Therefore, a technology gap exists in designing flat GRIN lenses with both high aperture efficiencies and superior 2-D multi-beam capabilities. In our work, new methodologies are first developed for high-aperture-efficiency 2-D wide-angle multi-beam flat GRIN lenses with low beam-scanning losses. A lens prototype, fed by 13 modules of 2 × 2 patch arrays, has been successfully constructed and simulated. Wide-angle multibeam radiations have been obtained with a beam coverage of about ±45⁰ in both xoz and yoz planes. The multibeam radiation patterns are stable in a 22.2% bandwidth from 12 to 15 GHz. The peak realized gain is 21.8 dBi at 13 GHz, corresponding to an aperture efficiency of 63%. Following that, numerical analyses of ray-path errors in the lens have been conducted to test the applicability of the proposed method. To mitigate the errors and further improve the radiation performance, an all-dielectric multi-beam GRIN lens has been designed, presenting a broader bandwidth of 42.8% and a simpler configuration using compact feed sources.
Speaker
Dr Peiyuan Qin
Associate Professor
University Of Technology Sydney
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Biography
Pei-Yuan Qin received a Ph.D. Degree from Macquarie University, Australia, in electromagnetic fields and microwave technology in 2012. From 2012 to 2015, he was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in CSIRO, Australia. From 2015 to 2016, he was a Chancellor's Postdoctoral Research Fellow/Lecturer with University of Technology Sydney (UTS), Australia. Since 2022, he is an Associate Professor with UTS. He is a visiting scholar with Harvard University in 2018. His research interests are in the areas of reconfigurable antennas, conformal antennas and arrays.
Dr Qin was awarded an Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Early Career Researcher Award in 2017. He was selected as world top 2% scientist by Stanford in year 2023. He has secured a total research income more than $3 million, including one ARC Discovery Early Career Researcher Award and two ARC Discovery Projects. He has served as General Co-Chairs/organising committee members for many flagship conferences. He is currently severing the Associate Editors of IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation and IEEE Open Journal of Antennas and Propagation. He is the founder and Chair of Australian Node - Antenna Measurement Techniques Association (AMTA). He is the Director of Electromagnetic Informatics Lab of UTS.
