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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ANTENNAS AND PROPAGATION, VOL. 60, NO. 11, NOVEMBER 2012

A Circularly-Polarized Isoflux Antenna Based on

Anisotropic Metasurface
Gabriele Minatti, Stefano Maci, Fellow, IEEE, Paolo De Vita, Angelo Freni, Senior Member, IEEE, and
Marco Sabbadini

AbstractTheory, design, realization and measurements of an

X-band isoflux circularly polarized antenna for LEO satellite platforms are presented. The antenna is based on a metasurface composed by a dense texture of sub-wavelength metal patches on a
grounded dielectric slab, excited by a surface wave generated by
a coplanar feeder. The antenna is extremely flat (1.57 mm) and
light (less than 1 Kg) and represents a competitive solution for
space-to-ground data link applications.
Index TermsLeaky wave antennas, metasurface antennas, surface impedance.

I. INTRODUCTION

FFICIENT low-mass and low-cost antennas for payload

data handling and transmissions (PDHT) with optimal
shaped beams are a major asset for space missions. These
antennas play an important role in Earth Observation, where
high transmission rate is necessary to acquire Earth images.
Examples of these antennas are recently manufactured by
Thales Alenia Space for RADARSAT and COSMO/SkyMed
missions, but their design dates back about ten years [1].
Future satellite missions will require new antennas with more
demanding performances for the radiation pattern, especially
in terms of cross-polarization discrimination. The antenna on
the satellite platform shall distribute a uniform power density
over a well-defined portion of the visible Earth surface. The
relevant shaped beam is referred to as isoflux pattern. LEO
satellite antennas shall provide EM isoflux coverage to the
Earth surface over a visibility cone with an apex angle of about
120 . This requirement is extremely difficult to satisfy for
many typologies of antennas, as a significant portion of the
radiation needs to be spread over a very large angular region.
The prototype antenna we present here, despite the use of a
new technology, closely satisfies the gain pattern requirements
in the requested frequency band (8.58.7 GHz), while showing
excellent circular polarization over the wide angular range.
Manuscript received January 16, 2012; revised April 08, 2012; accepted July
02, 2012. Date of publication July 13, 2012; date of current version October 26,
2012.
G. Minnatti and S. Maci are with Department of Information Engineering,
University of Siena, 53100 Siena, Italy (e-mail: macis@ing.unisi.it).
P. De Vita is with the Ingegneria dei Sistemi, Pisa, Italy (e-mail: p.devita@ids.
it).
A. Fremi is with the Department of Electronics and Telecommunications,
University of Florence, Florence IT-50139, Italy (e-mail: freni@unifi.it).
M. Sabbadini is with the European Space Agency, Noordwijk, The Netherlands (e-mail: sabbadini@esa.int).
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this paper are available online
at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TAP.2012.2208614

This simple, cost-effective and extremely thin antenna is

founded on an inhomogeneous anisotropic metasurface. A
metasurface is a thin metamaterial layer backed by a ground
plane and characterized by unusual reflection and dispersion
properties. Metasurfaces are obtained by a dense periodic
texture of small elements printed on a grounded slab with or
without shorting vias [2], [3]. These have been used in the
past to realize electromagnetic bandgaps (EBGs) or equivalent
magnetic-walls [3].
As described in [2][5] when a metasurface is inhomogeneous, namely when its characteristic parameters vary in space,
it is able to control the surface wave propagation path, as well
as polarization/radiation properties. This phenomenon, recently
denoted metasurfing [5], [6], can produce high-gain pencil
beam with circularly polarized radiation [6], [5].
The antenna presented here makes use of a planar metasurface to provide an isoflux shaped beam with circular polarization. Specifically, a cylindrical surface-wave (SW) is excited at
the center of the antenna by a small circularly polarized radiator,
and it is gradually transformed into a leaky-wave (LW) by the
interaction with the quasi-periodically modulated metasurface.
The metasurface is anisotropic to control the polarization of the
radiated field. The implementation of this anisotropy is similar
to that presented in [4]; however it makes use of circular patches
in place of square patches and the design criterion is different,
essentially because here the beam generated by the antenna is
shaped.
The paper is structured as follows. Section II presents the
isoflux mask used for LEO satellite platform. Section III
presents the criteria of conical radiation for isotropic uniform
and non-uniform (modulated) continuous metasurfaces excited
by a point source. Section IV extends the criteria to uniform
anisotropic metasurfaces, while Section V is indeed devoted
to modulated anisotropic metasurface and to the condition for
which the dominant LW contribution is circularly polarized.
Section VI specifies how to carry out the circularly polarized
anisotropic metasurface by small (sub-wavelength) patches.
Section VII describes the design procedure for the analysis and
optimization of the prototype, and Section VIII presents its
manufacturing and measurements. Conclusions are drawn in
Section IX.
II. ISOFLUX GAIN MASK
In our reference scenario, an antenna located on a LEO satellite platform must radiate a beam with homogeneous power density at the earth surface (Fig. 1). According to our design specifications, a satellite platform S is at distance over the sea level
in an altitude range comprised between 500 and 1000 Km. The

0018-926X/$31.00 2012 IEEE

MINATTI et al.: A CIRCULARLY-POLARIZED ISOFLUX ANTENNA BASED ON ANISOTROPIC METASURFACE

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Fig. 2. Envelope of the isoflux pattern for several orbital altitudes. All the patterns are comprised between upper and lower limit masks. The gain is considered as normalized with respect to the total input power.
Fig. 1. Geometrical description of the reference scenario for a LEO satellite
isoflux antenna. The power density radiated inside the visible cone must be homogenous at the ground level.

satellite is considered visible from a ground station when it is at

a minimum elevation angle
.
To provide a homogeneous power density on ground, the antenna must compensate the power loss due to the propagation
path by increasing the gain toward directions where the path is
longer. That is, the antenna gain pattern must satisfy the condition
where
is the maximum
distance between antenna and ground station, and is the observation angle versus the direction of the Earth centre. The relation
between the distance
and the other geometrical variables
is
(1)
Solving (1) determines the relation between the satellite to
Earth surface distance, and the gain profile to provide a homogeneous power density on ground:
(2)
where
(3)
where
and
. For satellite
altitudes between
and
Km, the relevant
isoflux patterns are comprised between a lower and an upper
limit gain masks as shown in Fig. 2.
The requirements are satisfied whenever the radiation pattern
will be comprised inside the upper and lower limits in the operational bandwidth 8.58.7 GHz. The cross polarization level
is requested to be lower than
dB all over the angular range.
Roughly speaking, the radiation pattern is in fact conical with
peak around 55 65 , a steep roll-off outside 65 and a broadside level around 0 dB. We will obtain this condition by playing
simultaneously with the metasurface and with the direct feed radiation. To this end, we analyze first the possibility to obtain a
conical radiation by a metasurface.

Fig. 3. Increasing slope effect when augmenting the radius of an isoflux antenna having field distribution given by (5).

A. Conventional Definition of Aperture Efficiency

Implementing a planar solution for wide-angle isoflux antennas with a steep roll-off sacrifices the antenna dimension.
The aperture efficiency defined in a conventional sense as
(4)
where is the aperture field distribution, loses its meaning for
aperture antennas that should respect the mask in Fig. 2. The
wide coverage angle and the rapid roll-off at the coverage edge,
imply extremely small efficiency when using (4). Actually, for
this application, it is by far more important to have a good
drop-off than a high efficiency defined by (4). As an example,
let us consider the case of isoflux beam realized by an aperture
distribution of the type
(5)
is the drop-off angle (in our case
) and
where
is a parameter that adjusts the level at broadside (in our case
). It is seen (Fig. 3) that to change the slope in the range
65 75 from 5 dB/10 to 13 dB/10 the aperture radius must be
increased from 3 to 7 wavelengths. As a direct consequence the
aperture efficiency for the aperture distribution (5) for a radius
of
is
, showing how misleading the use of the
standard definition of efficiency is.

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In fact, the efficiency in (4) does not give any information

about how close its pattern is to the desired isoflux one or, equivalently, how close to the optimum is the distribution of (equivalent) currents on the radiating aperture.
B. Weighted Tapering Efficiency
A figure of merit that better describes the antenna performance for this kind of application is obtained by
(6)
which is denoted by weighted aperture efficiency. In (6)
is a reference (ideal) tapered field illumination which gives the
desired isoflux pattern as provided by the mask. It can be easily
seen, from the Schwarz inequality with a scalar integral product
over the aperture, that this efficiency is always less than or equal
to unity. It is unity when and only when
. Whenever
the reference aperture distribution is chosen as uniform over the
aperture,
recovers the standard efficiency definition in (4).
By using as a reference aperture distribution the inverse Fourier
transform of (3)
(with
km), the
weighted efficiency relevant to the distribution (5) with
radius is
, which is a better figure of merit for the
distribution under the intended purpose.

Fig. 4. Radial periodic modulation of impedance and identification of an elemental sector with a one dimensional sinusoidal reactance problem.

where and are the free-space wavenumber and impedance,

respectively. Equation (8) implies a relation between reactance
and propagation constant: the larger the average reactance, the
shorter the SW wavelength.
B. Cylindrically Modulated Periodic Reactance
Assume now a periodic radial modulation of the reactance
with period (this will be implemented later by changing the
dimensions of the printed patches still maintaining them very
small in terms of a wavelength). We assume that the reactance
variation
is described by the sinusoidal function

III. ISOTROPIC UNIFORM AND MODULATED CONTINUOUS

METASURFACE
The metasurface that forms the radiating part of the antenna
is made up with a thin grounded dielectric slab periodically
loaded by sub-wavelength printed patches. We assume here
that the printed elements are so small that the set of patches
plus grounded slab can be equivalently modeled by continuous
boundary conditions of reactive type, which we suppose located
in
and, for the moment, to be isotropic. We consider
first a uniform inductive reactance, and next a cylindrically
modulated inductive reactance.
A. Uniform Impedance of Inductive Reactance Type
Let us first assume uniform impedance boundary conditions
of inductive reactance type; i.e., assume a relationship between
the tangential components of the electric and magnetic fields of
the type
where the reactance
is a positive scalar quantity. In this case, the structure supports the propagation of a
cylindrical bounded SW, whose
electric and magnetic tangent fields at the metasurface are given
by

(7)
where
denotes a Hankel function of the second kind of
order one, and
are the unit vectors of the radial coordinates.
The wavenumber
can be found by imposing a transverse
resonance with the free space TM impedance [5]; leading to
(8)

(9)
where

is the average value, is the modulation index, and

. It is expected that the interaction of the SW with
the radial sinusoidal modulated reactance transforms the SW in
a LW, thus producing a conical radiation. As in [5], the structure
may be thought as obtained by rotating a one-dimensional periodic surface around the axis (Fig. 4). The interaction between
the cylindrical SW and the cylindrical modulated reactance is
therefore locally modeled by the interaction between a plane
SW and a surface reactance sinusoidally modulated in one dimension. Oliner and Hessel solved the latter problem in 59 [7].
Their results are briefly summarized below for the readers convenience.
Modulating the surface reactance with a sinusoidal function
as in (9) produces a small perturbation on both the real and imaginary parts of
obtained for a uniform surface reactance (i.e.,
); that is,
. In [7], a simple
algorithm to calculate
is presented; this algorithm
shows that
depends on the normalized impedance
, the modulation index , the period .
For the problem described by the radial periodic impedance in
(9), the aperture SW field in the homogeneous reactance transforms in
(10)
This field can be represented by a series of n-indexed Floquet
waves whose wavenumbers are given by
. We assume
to be the one found by the
Oliner-Hessel procedure. Among all the Floquet modes, those

MINATTI et al.: A CIRCULARLY-POLARIZED ISOFLUX ANTENNA BASED ON ANISOTROPIC METASURFACE

Fig. 5. Normalized average surface reactance as a function of the average pebeam in a direction
for both forward and
riodicity to obtain a single
backward modes. Curves are referred to beams ranging from 40 to 70 off axis
angle.

having
namely

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Fig. 6. Behavior of

as a function of
for different pointing angles
in the backward configuration and for different values of
modulation index (0.3, 0.4, 0.5).

where k is the free-space wavenumber,

(11)

are LWs and contribute to the radiating beam. It is worth noting

that (11) can be satisfied only for negative-index Floquet modes.
The dominant LW mode has index
and leads to a beam
pointing at
defined by
(12)
Depending on whether the beam is directed in the same or in
the opposite sense with respect to the exciting SW propagation
direction, the LW is referred to as forward LW,
or backward LW,
, respectively [7]. By analogy, we will refer to the relevant
radiated beam as forward or backward beam.
It is important to find when the
indexed LW is the only
radiating mode (we refer to this condition as unimodal regime).
We start for simplicity by considering
for which
can be neglected in (12). From (11) and (12) it is straightforward
to demonstrate the following:
a single backward beam in direction
is produced by a
surface impedance given by
(13)
where is the free space wavewhen
length;
a single forward beam in direction
is produced by a
surface impedance
(14)
or
when
Fig. 5 shows the normalized average reactance versus the normalized periodicity for several
ranging from 40 to 70 resulting in a backward or a forward single beam.

Being the structure cylindrical, a conical radiation with aperture angle

is obtained for both cases in which the elemental
sector radiation is backward or forward, provided that each elemental sector has a single beam. On the one hand, the forward mode operation implies a larger period for a fixed level of
impedance, which is a desirable property for the reconstruction
of gradual impedance variation with small patches. On the other
hand, being the period equal, the forward mode requires much
higher impedance. For instance, a single beam at
requires
. Namely, it requires a surface reactance
around a thousand Ohms, which is difficult to implement in
printed technology. For this reason, we will use here a backward
mode radiation. It is also clear from Fig. 5 that low reactance
levels imply a more sensitive variation of the beam angle with
frequency (i.e., a smaller antenna bandwidth). The choice of the
impedance surface is actually a compromise between having a
surface with large reactance values and a period as large as possible to have a smooth variation. A good compromise is found
for
.
Fig. 6 presents
as a function of
for different pointing
angles
in the backward configuration and
for different values of the modulation index. The curves are obtained using the Oliner-Hessel method. The values of
increases for increasing modulation index and for decreasing ,
as expected; however, it remains within acceptable small values.
The deviation
obtained by the Oliner-Hessel method, presented in Fig. 7, has a very minor impact in comparison with
. For instance, in the case of modulation index
and unit normalized impedance, one obtains
.
Using an isotropic metasurface, the conical beam cannot be
circularly polarized. Control of the polarization implies the use
of an anisotropic metasurface. In the following, we first introduce an anisotropic uniform metasurface and continue next with
an anisotropic modulated metasurface.

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which has been cast in reactive form since we are looking for a
bounded SW. Since
(20)
transverse resonance leads to
which admits non-trivial solutions only for
The latter equation can be re-written as follows

,
.

(21)
Its solution admits two eigenvalues. The dominant
(quasi-TM) eigenvalue is given by
Fig. 7. Behavior of
and
of average normalized reactance
.

as a function of
for different values
and backward pointing angle

(22)
where

IV. ANISOTROPIC CONTINUOUS UNIFORM METASURFACE

Let us consider a surface that is uniform and anisotropic.
Namely, the tangential fields on the surface are subjected to anisotropic boundary condition
, where the impedance dyad is written in
matrix form, in terms of its cylindrical components along the
unit vectors and as follows

Equation (22) is equal to (8), except for the use of an equivalent reactance
in place of
. If (18) holds, (23) can be
approximated as follows

(15)

(24)

tangential elec-

The equivalent reactance

slightly deviates from those
of the isotropic cases for the presence of the correction term
. This means that under (18) the
anisotropic impedance supports a dominant mode which is the
same as that of an isotropic impedance of effective value
.
This allows the use the plots in Figs. 5 and 7 also for the design
of the anisotropic surface just considering the vertical axis as
.

The dominant SW is expected to have at

tric and magnetic components of the form

(16)
where the modal coefficients
each other by

are related
(17)

denotes transpose. In absence of losses the

in which apex
impedance matrix is anti-Hermitian, (i.e.,
) [8],
which implies
and
real and
. In practical situation, being the element that realizes the anisotropic
impedance extremely small, the anisotropic effect is quite weak,
thus obtaining
(18)
This condition implies that the cylindrical hybrid TE-TM SW
contains a large TM
component and a small TE
component
.
A. Resonance Equation
The propagation constant
along can be obtained by considering the resonance along between the surface impedance
and the dyadic free space impedance
(19)

(23)

B. Aperture Field Expression for SW

In the assumption
purely imaginary (this happens in the practical case that we will see in Section VI), using
(17), (18), (20) and (22), the SW dominant quasi-TM mode can
be approximated as
(25)
where

, and
.
V. ANISOTROPIC MODULATED METASURFACE

The optimum way to obtain a circularly polarized antenna

is to require that each point of the surface (namely each small
patch of the metasurface) radiates a circularly polarized field.
However, this is extremely difficult to get since
in (25) is
a real number in most cases. It is simpler to devise a surface
composed by circularly polarized sub-surfaces whose area is
smaller than
. This area can be identified with a single
period of sinusoidal modulation along and a small angle

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along . The radiation from the sub-surfaces plays a similar

role to that played by the element-factor in the product (element
factor) (array factor) of array theory.
Achieving such a behavior is greatly simplified if one considers an azimuth-rotating first-order excitation
.
In fact, one can exploit the following identity
(26)
which expresses the possibility to circularly polarize the aperture in Cartesian coordinates by equalizing the and quadrature components.
A. Metasurface-Tensor Modulated Components
Let us assume that the normalized components of the reactance tensor are described by the functions
(27)
(28)
(29)
where
is chosen as shown in
Section III to produce a conical beam at in backward mode,
and
and
are modulation indexes whose ratio
has to be chosen in order to obtain circularly polarized aperture sub-surfaces. We anticipate that the relationship between
and
in (28) and (29) can be automatically satisfied by
exploiting a symmetry of the single element that constitutes the
homogenized surface. Equations (27)(29) exhibit an average
equivalence surface impedance

Fig. 8. Behavior of the field in one radial period of an anisotropic non-uniform

periodic metasurface.

The field
is linearly polarized at each point of the surface
and when one moves along it rotates and makes a
complete turn in a period
. The situation is sketched
in Fig. 8. This property, together with the fact that each incremental strip is excited with initial phase
, allows one to identify through (26) a -independent circular polarization of type
for each subsurface.
B. Condition for

Circularly Polarized Sub-Surface

The radiation from the continuous surface can be seen as the

superposition of elementary sub-surfaces of angular dimension
and radial length . The effective
contribution from each sub-surface is obtained by averaging the
field along , i.e.,

(30)
The above expression is used in Fig. 5 to find the value of
and thus that of
appearing in (27)(29). However, for
and values of reactance
, the correction
term proportional to
is negligible.
Using (27)(29) in (25), and neglecting the term proportional
to
in the product
, leads to the following approximation for the electric field
tangential to the surface

(33)
where
(34)

(35)
(31)
where the term

required for the evaluation of

can be obtained by using the Oliner-Hessel
method within the approximation (24). Equation (31) is the summation of a TM modal term
and an oscillating and hybrid
TE-TM contribution
. The term
does not provide a
significant radiation contribution since its phase velocity is less
than the speed of light in free-space. The field
forms an
angle
with the radial direction given by
(32)

with
is therefore

elliptically

polarized,

. Each sub-surface
with axial ratio
. Since

(13) and (22) imply

condition

, the circular
can be rewritten as

polarization

(36)
where we have approximated
the conditions under which the

by assuming to hold on
-depending correction term

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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ANTENNAS AND PROPAGATION, VOL. 60, NO. 11, NOVEMBER 2012

Fig. 10. Sequential-rotation excited patch feed embedded in the metasurface.

Fig. 9. Quantities involved in the design as a function of the normalized

impedance.

in (30) is negligible. From (26), the

field becomes

sub-surface effective
(37)

.
where
Fig. 9 shows
as a function of under (36) from various
values of . For the sake of convenience, the same figure also
shows the parameters
(38)
and
C. Aperture

.
Radiated Field

Under condition (36), for a circular aperture field of radius

, the far field is obtained from the radiation
integral

(Fig. 10). The patch is printed at the same level of the metasurface and it is excited in sequential rotation by four pins displaced symmetrically with respect to the center. A square area
all around the circular patch is left without metasurface and its
dimension serves as a design parameter. The role of the patch
is not only that to excite a surface wave along the metasurface
but also to radiate directly in the broadside direction for adjusting the radiation pattern inside the mask of Fig. 2.
VI. PIXEL-TYPE DESIGN THROUGH PRINTED PATCHES
In the previous section we have treated the basic design
issues of non-uniform anisotropic metasurface without considering its practical implementation. In this section we show the
design process of the normalized reactance tensor components
(27)(29) through printed patches. To emphasize that these
patches are small in terms of wavelength, we will sometimes
denote them as well as the cell that they occupy as pixel. The
pixel design process consists of three steps. We first choose
a suitable patch geometry for the anisotropic impedance patterning. Then, we create reactance maps of the values of the
impedance tensor components versus two geometrical parameters of the pixel. Finally we synthesize a path on the reactance
maps that reconstruct the needed value (27)(29).
A. Pixel Shape

(39)
which can be manipulated to yield

(40)
This expression is used to get the aperture radius that allows us
to reach the sufficient level of gain at . We observe that these
dimensions should be large enough for allowing a very high
slope in the angular range 65 75 . Also, it is worth emphasize
that (40) accounts for the leaky attenuation constant in
.
D. Sequential-Rotation Patch-Feed
To excite a surface wave with phase
, a resonant circular
patch of diameter is placed at the center of the metasurface

To produce anisotropic impedance, the patch geometry must

not be symmetric with respect to the SW direction of propagation. Also, the cross-diagonal terms
of the reactance tensor
must be real according to the considerations made in the previous section about circular polarization.
Several geometrical shapes have been investigated (Fig. 11).
The solution of Fig. 11(b) is the one suggested in [4]. All the
investigated solutions exhibit two non-dimensional parameters
and which primarily affect the co-diagonal and cross-diagonal reactance levels, respectively. The first parameter
is the ratio between one characteristic length of the geometry normalized to the side
of the periodic cell. Roughly
speaking, the larger is the ratio
the larger is the area of the
patch. Increasing this parameter implies increasing the value
of co-polar reactances
and
. The second parameter
is an angular parameter , which is the orientation of the slot
direction (Fig. 11(a), (b) and (d)), or the ellipse axis direction
(Fig. 11(c)). This parameter influences dominantly the value
of
. Due to the limitation of space available, we do not
present here the performance comparison for all the elements
investigated. We focus only to the solution that exhibits the best

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Fig. 11. Patch geometries for anisotropic impedance surface. Each geometry
and that are taken
possesses two specific non-dimensional parameters
for constructing the reactance maps. The arrow denotes the direction of SW
propagation.

performance for our purposes: the circular patch with a narrow

cut of Fig. 11(d) that we denote as screw-head patch (SHP).
B. Parameter-Plane Map for SHP
To evaluate the impedance tensor of the screw-head patch
this is assumed embedded in a periodic Cartesian lattice. A periodic Method of Moment (MoM) analysis is applied for a limited
but sufficiently dense number of
pairs. The pole-zero
matching (PZM) method [9] is then used to interpolate the results obtained on the design-plane
.
C. Surface Texture
To texture the antenna surface with the appropriate elements,
one has to find the right parameter-plane path (PPP) which satisfies both conditions
and
(namely (27)(28)), once one has fixed
, so that
respects the circular polarization
condition (36) and satisfies (38). A least-square optimization performed on the entire design-plane can be conveniently
used to find the best path. It is worth noting that, because of
the symmetry properties of
, the same path also ensures
that the relation
is satisfied.
These paths are shown by dashed lines in Fig. 12(a)(c) for the
case
and
(i.e.,
). The
anisotropic metasurface is textured on a Cartesian rectangular
lattice starting from a square region of side around the source
(see Fig. 10). The period of the Cartesian lattice is chosen as
an entire fraction of the requested (e.g.,
ranging from 1/4
to 1/6, which corresponds to
ranging approximately from
1/8 to 1/12). The choice of the period is actually dictated by
technological considerations, since very small elements collide
with manufacturing tolerance.
The position in the rectangular lattice of each pixel is associated to its distance from the origin, and, therefore, to a specific
position along the PPP. The latter defines the slot orientation
and the patch radius. The final picture is a circular patch whose
slot continuously rotates and gradually changes its dimension
within a modulation period , when we move along the radial
coordinate.
Fig. 13 shows the construction geometry and the behavior of
the field along a radial path. This picture emphasizes that the
LW propagating along the radial direction leaks energy backward, due to the modulation in patch sizes, and its electric field
component tangent to the surface rotates by interacting with the
slot of the patches.

Fig. 12. Impedance map and relevant path to obtain an anisotropic surface
impedance in (27)(29).

VII. PROTOTYPE DESIGN, ANALYSIS AND OPTIMIZATION

A. Surface Design
The overall design process to synthesize an antenna operating
in the frequency band from 8.5 to 8.7 GHz, and having a gain
pattern satisfying the mask of Fig. 2, is defined herein after. The
fundamental parameters are the normalized impedance surface
, the angle , and the couple of modulation indexes
and
. As a starting point, we have used
and
. From (38) (plotted in Fig. 9) we have derived the
period of the modulation normalized to wavelength obtaining
and
mm. From (36), also plotted in Fig. 9,
we obtain the ratio
that ensures a circular polarization of

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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ANTENNAS AND PROPAGATION, VOL. 60, NO. 11, NOVEMBER 2012

Fig. 14. Numerical analysis of the complete antenna. Sketch of the meshed
structure. In the inset, the gain pattern of the central patch feed, when the metasurface is not present.

Fig. 13. Metasurface texture and field behavior on an elementary subsurface

of one modulation period.

the aperture (i.e.,

). By using the approximated field
in (40) one can define the radius of the aperture that allows
for a co-polar gain of 9 dB at
(which is the maximum
level of the mask in Fig. 2). Note that (40) takes into account
the leaky attenuation constant inside
. With this method we
obtained
and an aperture of
mm
(about
at 8.6 GHz).
After identifying the substrate to print the patches (we have
chosen Arlon AR 1000,
and thickness 1.575 mm), we
textured the surface by using SHPs through the design-plane
path process illustrated in Section VI.C. The dimension
of
the pixels (i.e., the period of the constant lattice) should be an
entire fraction of the period . This value should range from
to
depending on the technology used. In our case, we
decided for
mm.
The circularly polarized feeding patch has been designed with
the structure of Fig. 10. The patch diameter of
mm has
been chosen to resonate at 8.6 GHz. The gain pattern of the feed
when the metasurface is not present (i.e., no SHPs are printed on
the upper face of the substrate) is shown in the inset of Fig. 14.
The maximum gain at broadside is 4 dBi. We emphasize that
the feed gain level at broadside is also approximately the gain
level of the overall antenna. With the above parameters we need
around 12000 SHPs to cover the entire surface.
B. Analysis and Optimization
The overall antenna structure is analyzed by using a method
of moment code based on the multilayer adaptive integral
method (MLayAIM) [10], [11], which is highly suitable for the
analysis of multilayered patch antenna arrays with a limited
number of vertical conductors. Fig. 14 shows a sketch of the
mesh of the structure. Each SHP has been meshed with about 60
RWG basis functions for a total of around 720 000 unknowns.
The structure has been optimized by using as parameters the
period and the side of the square area outside which the
SHP starts (see Fig. 10). When is changed, the SHP dimensioning has been maintained perfectly scaled by adapting the

Fig. 15. Simulated gain pattern (RHCP co-polar, and LHCP cross-polar components) of the optimized antenna at three frequencies. The SHP is characterized
mm,
mm, ranging from 3.78 mm to 4.18 mm.
by

Fig. 16. Printed layout of the antenna feed circuit (before 50

mounted). (b) Return loss at the input port of the antenna.

loads are

PPP to the new value of (see Fig. 12). The optimization has
been performed at 8.6 GHz by using a standard optimization
algorithm, starting from
mm and
mm. The optimization process led to
mm,
mm and an
antenna diameter of 540 mm. The gain pattern obtained numerically for a few frequencies is shown in Fig. 15. The result is
fully satisfactory if we consider that the prototype has been optimized by using only two parameters.
VIII. PROTOTYPE REALIZATION AND MEASUREMENTS
A prototype of the designed antenna has been manufactured
using a GIL GML 1034 substrate (
, thickness 0.508
mm) for the feeding circuit (Fig. 16(a)). For the metasurface

MINATTI et al.: A CIRCULARLY-POLARIZED ISOFLUX ANTENNA BASED ON ANISOTROPIC METASURFACE

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Fig. 17. Photograph of the realized prototype (above) and a detail of the feeding
zone without exciter pins (below).

(Fig. 17), a substrate Arlon AR 1000 (

and thickness
1.575 mm) has been used, which has the same permittivity and
thickness of the TMM 10i accredited for space.
A rotational SW is launched on the surface by feeding the
central patch, with diameter 6.2 mm, with four small vertical
dipoles excited with 0 , 90 , 180 , 270 phasing. The correct
phase excitation is provided by a 180 hybrid coupler connected
with other two 90 hybrid couplers (Fig. 16(a)). The input port
of the 180 hybrid is fed by a coaxial line. A matched 50
load is connected to the decoupled port of each hybrid coupler
to absorb reflected power. Fig. 16(b) shows the measured reflection coefficient at the input port of the antenna. Fig. 17 gives an
overview of the antenna, with a detail of the feed.
Fig. 18 shows the measured and simulated gain patterns,
respectively, for a few frequencies, including one outside the
band of interest (8.8 GHz, Fig. 18(d)). A good agreement
between numerical and experimental results is shown for the
co-polar components, while a higher value of the cross-polar
component is found around broadside in the measured patterns. This is probably due to the imperfection of the feeder.
Cross-polar components are anyway satisfactory in the overall
angular range. Fig. 19 shows the measured gain at 8.6 GHz in
the plane
. This gives an idea
of the symmetry of the pattern in the azimuth plane.
By using as a reference aperture distribution the inverse
Fourier transform of (3)
with
km, the weighted aperture efficiency of the realized antennas
is
(against a conventional aperture efficiency of
, which compares very favorably with that of a
continuous aperture with the illumination law given in (5) and

Fig. 18. Comparisons between measurements and experimental results in the

working band at (a) 8.5 GHz, (b) 8.6 GHz, (c) 8.7 GHz, and outside the working
band at (d) 8.8 GHz. The Gain is normalized with respect to the total power. The
cuts shown are on a symmetry plane of the feed.

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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ANTENNAS AND PROPAGATION, VOL. 60, NO. 11, NOVEMBER 2012

pins with sequential phase rotation, is used for exciting the surface. The feeder also contributes to the overall radiation, mostly
in the broadside direction. The final prototype of the antenna
has a radius of 7.5 wavelengths, which is a result comparable
to the one obtained in [1] (6.5 wavelengths), with a weighted
tapering efficiency of 88%. It is realized according to the analytical design, provides satisfactory performances and the numerical results obtained in latest design stages are proven to be
very accurate. The losses have been seen to be very low due to
the sub-wavelength dimension of the elements which implies
weak currents on the antenna surface.
Most of all, the antenna is extremely flat (1.57 mm), light (less
than 1 Kg) and it is built with the same PCB process used for
standard printed circuit. Thus, the final device has a significant
potential as a low-cost, simple solution for space application.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT
We thank Prof. M. Orefice and his team at Polytechnic of
Turin for having carried out the measurement of the prototype.
We also thank M. Bandinelli of Ingegneria dei Sistemi (IDS),
Pisa, Italy for leading the IDS activity in the frame of the project
supported by European Space agency contract (ESA Contract
No. 22808/09/NL/JD/al).
Fig. 19. Gain measurements at 8.6 GHz in the horizontal plane, (a) RHCP component and (b) LHCP component.

REFERENCES
shows that our solution is quite close to the optimum for the
chosen aperture diameter.

IX. CONCLUSION
A planar metasurface isoflux-type antenna has been successfully designed and manufactured for LEO satellite application.
The antenna on the satellite platform shall radiate a uniform
power density over a well-defined portion of the visible Earth
surface. The radiation mechanism exploited in the design is
based on the transformation of a bounded
SW mode into
an unbounded LW due to the interaction with the reactance of a
sinusoidally modulated anisotropic metasurface. The reactance
is realized by a dense texture of sub-wavelength metal patches
printed on a grounded dielectric slab and excited by an in-plane
feeder. The patches have a circular shape with a thin slit cut
along their diameter: the reactance tensor depends on both the
area covered by the patch and the slit tilt angle with respect to
the incidence direction of the surface wave. Roughly speaking,
changing the area of the patch is responsible for the intensity of
the radiation, whereas the rotation of the slit controls the polarization of the radiated field.
By an appropriate metasurface modulation, the
indexed
Floquet-wave mode creates a circularly polarized aperture field
that radiates a conical beam. A small circular patch, fed by four

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Wireless Communications (MIKON), Jun. 1416, 2010.
[2] D. Sievenpiper, L. Zhang, F. J. Broas, N. G. Alexopulos, and E.
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47, no. 11, pp. 20592074, Nov. 1999.
[3] P.-S. Kildal, A. Kishk, and S. Maci, Special issue in artificial magnetic conductors, soft/hard surfaces, and other complex surfaces,
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MINATTI et al.: A CIRCULARLY-POLARIZED ISOFLUX ANTENNA BASED ON ANISOTROPIC METASURFACE

Gabriele Minatti was born in Florence, Italy, on

1982. He received the M.S. degree (cum laude)
in electronic engineering from the University of
Florence, Italy, in 2008 and the Ph.D. degree in
information engineering from the University of
Siena, Siena, Italy, in 2012.
He is presently working under a scholarship
from the University of Siena. His research interests
include periodic structures, artificial surfaces and
holographic leaky wave antennas.
Dr. Minatti was awarded with other coauthors with
the Best Paper on Antenna Theory at the 5th European Conference on Antennas
and propagation (EuCAP-2011, Rome, Italy, 2011) and with the Antenna Innovation Award at the 33rd ESA antenna Workshop (ESTEC, Noordwijk, The
Netherlands, 2011).

Stefano Maci (M92SM99F04) was born in

Rome, Italy, in 1961. He received the Ph.D. degree
in electronic engineering from the University of
Florence, Florence, Italy, in 1987.
He is a Full Professor the University of Siena,
with scientific responsibility of a group of 15
researchers (http://www.dii.unisi.it/~lea/). He is
the Director of the Ph.D. School of Information
Engineering and Science (which presently includes
about 60 Ph.D. students). His present research
interests are focused on high-frequency and beam
representation methods, computational electromagnetics, large phased arrays,
planar antennas, reflector antennas and feeds, metamaterials and metasurfaces.
Since 2000, he was responsible of five projects funded by the European Union
(EU). In 20042007, he was WP leader of the Antenna Center of Excellence
(ACE, FP6-EU) and in 20072010 he was International Coordinator of a
24-institution consortium of a Marie Curie Action (FP6). He also carried out
several projects supported by the European Space Agency (ESA-ESTEC),
the European Defense Agency (EDA), the US-Army Research Laboratory
(ARL), and by various industries and research institutions: EADS-MATRA,
(Tolosa, Francia), IDS (Pisa, Italia), TICRA (Copenhagen), SELEX SISTEMI
INTEGRATI (Rome, Italy), THALES (Paris, France), TNO (Den Hague,
The Netherlands), OTO MELARA (La Spezia, Italia), OFFICINE GALILEO
(Florence, Italy), SELEX Communication (Florence), Thales Alenia Space
(Rome). His research activity is documented in 10 book chapters, 110 papers
published in international journals, (among which 76 on IEEE journals), and
about 300 papers in proceedings of international conferences.
Prof. Maci was elected Fellow of IEEE in 2003. Since 2000, he was
a member the Technical Advisory Board of 11 international conferences,
member of the Review Board of 6 International Journals. He organized 23
special sessions in international conferences and he held 10 short courses in
the IEEE Antennas and Propagation Society (AP-S) Symposia about metamaterials, antennas and computational electromagnetics. He was an Associate
Editor of the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ELECTROMAGNETIC CAPABILITY and of
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ANTENNAS AND PROPAGATION and two times Guest
Editor of special issues of the latter journal. He is presently Director of ESoA,
a member of the Board of Directors of the European Association on Antennas
and Propagation (EuRAAP), a member of the Technical Advisory Board of the
URSI Commission B, a member elected of the AdCom of IEEE Antennas and
Propagation Society, a member of the Governing Board of the European Science Foundation (ESF) Project NewFocus, a member of the Governing board
of the FP7 coordination action CARE (Coordinating the Antenna Research
in Europe), a Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE Antennas and Propagation
Society (AP-S), a member of the Antennas and Propagation Executive Board
of the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET, UK), and a member
of the Focus Group on METAMATERIALS in the Finmeccanica project
Mind-Share. In 2004, he founded the European School of Antennas (ESoA),
a post graduate school that presently comprises 30 courses on Antennas,
Propagation, Electromagnetic Theory, and Computational Electromagnetics.

5009

ESoA counts about 150 among the best teachers of Europe (which include 11
IEEE Fellows) and it is frequented by an average of 220 students per year. The
ESoA consortium presently comprises 33 European research centres and offers
twelve one-week courses per year. In 20052007, he was Italian National
representative of the NATO SET-TG 084 Emerging Technology for Sensor
and Front-ends, and he is presently involved as co-representative in the NATO
SET-181 RTG on Metamaterials for Defense and Security Applications.
He was co-founder of two spinoff-companies and since 2008 he is honorary
President of LEAntenne e Progetti SPA (Valeggio sul Mincio, VE). His h index
is 25, with a record of more than 2000 citations (source Google Scholar).

Paolo De Vita received the M.S. degree in electronic engineering and the Ph.D.
degree in information and telecommunication engineering from the University
of Florence, Florence, Italy, in 1999 and 2004, respectively.
From 1999 to 2007, he has served as a Research Assistant at the Department
of Electronics and Telecommunication, University of Florence. Since 2008, he
is with IDS Ingegneria dei Sistemi, Pisa, Italy. His main research interests are
on numerical techniques for electromagnetic radiation and scattering problems.

Angelo Freni (S90M91SM03) received the

Laurea (Doctors) degree in electronics engineering
from the University of Florence, Florence, Italy, in
1987.
Since 1990, he is with the Department of Electronic Engineering, University of Florence, Italy, first
as Assistant Professor and from 2002 as Associate
Professor of electromagnetism. From 1995 to 1999,
he has also been an Adjunct Professor at the University of Pisa, and on 2010/2012 a Visiting Professor
at the TU Delft University of Technology, Delft, The
Netherlands. During 1994, he was involved in research at the Engineering Department of the University of Cambridge, U.K., concerning the extension and
the application of the finite element method to the electromagnetic scattering
from periodic structures. Between 2009 and 2010, he also spent one year as a
researcher at the TNO Defence, Security and Safety, The Hague, The Netherlands, working on the electromagnetic modeling of kinetic inductance devices
and their coupling with array of slots in THz range. His research interests include
meteorological radar systems, radiowave propagation, numerical and asymptotic methods in electromagnetic scattering and antenna problems, electromagnetic interaction with moving media and remote sensing. In particular, part of his
research concerned numerical techniques based on the integral-equation, with
focus on domain-decomposition and fast solution methods.

Marco Sabbadini received the M.Sc. degree in

1983.
Since 1988, he has been with the European Space
Agency, currently in the post of Senior Antenna
Engineer, at ESTEC in Noordwijk (NL). Previously,
he was with the Antenna Group, Thales Alenia Space
Italy, Roma (IT). His main areas of professional
activity are: electromagnetic modelling algorithms,
computational electromagnetics and computer-aided
antenna engineering tools as well as creative solutions in space antenna technology. Among others
his main contribution in the space antenna field include: the conception of the
antenna design framework and the management of its development over the
past 20 years, a leading role in the development of the electromagnetic data
exchange language, the initial work on leaky-lens antennas. Currently he is
involved in space antenna miniaturisation finding ways to make antennas use
in the best way the limited space and mass allocation available on spacecraft.