Research On The Scattering Characteristics Of Low-Profile Planar And Conformal Antenna Array

Stealth technology has become one of the key technologies of a modern high-tech electronic warfare. To avoid the detection by the enemy and meanwhile to ensure the normal communication between the equipment thus entails stringent requirements on the stealth performance of the antenna system. How to reduce the radar cross section of the antenna and keep the radiation characteristics of the antenna in the meantime becomes an important problem of enhancing the whole stealth performance of the target. With advantages of small size, light weight and low profile, planar and conformal antennas are commonly used in air craft. This paper focuses on the research about RCS reduction techniques of microstrip slot antenna array, and meanwhile analyzes the scattering properties of conformal microstrip slot array, striving to reduce the RCS of antenna while keeping the radiation performances.The main work of this paper can be summarized as follows:1. A 4×4 planar microstrip slot array antenna is designed. The contribution of each component to the total scattering field is analyzed, which provides a theoretical foundation for RCS reduction of the antenna array.2. Utilizing phase control principle of the reflecting array antenna, a kind of metamaterial is designed and loaded onto the slot array. By controlling the phase of the array’s scattering field, the scattering field of the antenna array will deflect towards four directions, therefore the monostatic in a wide frequency-band and bistatic RCS in a wide-angle range are reduced. Meanwhile, the radiation performance is well kept.3. Radiation and scattering properties are compared between the planar microstrip slot array antenna and cylindrical conformal array antenna. The influence of the size of curvature radius to radiation and scattering performances of cylindrical conformal microstrp slot array antenna is also researched.4. The principle of metamaterial absorber is analyzed, and an ultrathin absorber, which is insensitive to polarization with wide angle and high absorbing rate, is designed. It can achieve the goal of reducing the in-band RCS of antenna by loading the absorber onto slotting patch of the conformal slot array.