Self-adapting conformal phased array antennas for complex changing surfaces

Conformal antennas placed on complex surfaces are gaining more attention as a method to increase coverage of modern wireless communication systems. These antennas are capable of adapting to surfaces that change shape in time thus raising the issue of keeping the radiation pattern undistorted when the array is deformed. In this work the projection method is exploited to solve this problem and to fabricate two new self-adapting conformal array antennas: a 1 × 4 and a 1 × 6 arrays that bend according to an S-shaped and a Z-shaped surface respectively. These two conformal arrays consist of microstrip patch antennas distanced l from each other, a reconfigurable sensor circuit used to measure the curvature of the conformal surfaces and voltage controlled phase-shifters through which phase-compensation is implemented to autonomously recover the radiation pattern as the surfaces on which the arrays are placed change shape. Throughout this paper analytical computations, full-wave numerical simulations and measurements are compared and shown to agree.