Simulation and design of reconfigurable planar antennas using metasurfaces
Planar antennas, reconfigurable antennas, metasurfaces, reconfiguration, wireless communications
All over the world, the evolution of the technological apparatus for telecommunications systems has been increasingly required, as a clear consequence of the exponentially growth in the demand for wireless communication services. Therefore, the integration of multiple wireless standards on a single platform, like a reconfigurable antenna, also known as tunable antenna, is attracting much attention. Metasurfaces structures have been extensively used in recent years to improve the performance of planar antennas for wireless applications, including reconfiguration. A metasurface (also referred to as a metafilm) is the equivalent of a metamateriaI surface. More precisely, one metafilm is a surface with a distribution of small scatterers arranged along a region of space, to achieve desirable electromagnetic behaviors. For many applications, metasurfaces can be used in place of metamaterials because they have the advantage of taking up less physical space than the three-dimensional structures of metamaterials, offering the possibility of reduced losses, which has generated great interest. Therefore, this master thesis presents the simulation, design and implementation of planar antenna structures coupled to metasurfaces structures in order to reconfigure frequency, polarization and multiband antennas for wireless communications applications. The analysis of the antenna structures is performed with the aid of computational tools. Prototypes are fabricated and measured for experimental verification purpose. Simulations and measurements results are in good agreement.