Miniaturized 3-D Printable Composite Metasurface for 1-D Beam Steering

This paper presents a 3-D-printable metal-dielectric unit cell-based composite metasurface with a lower profile for 1-D beam steering of aperture-type antennas. The proposed metasurface also incorporates near-field phase correction to enhance far-field radiation performance. Two types of highly transmitting unit cells are introduced to achieve a wide range of transmission phase delays. The efficacy of the proposed metasurface is analyzed numerically in conjunction with a resonant cavity antenna. The system can steer the beam 360° in the azimuth plane (ϕ), with a predefined beam tilting in the elevation plane (θ). Moreover, the directivity deviation is minimal, at 1.53 dB, across the beam steering range, coupled with excellent impedance matching.