AbstractThe airborne radomes have to cater superior electromagnetic (EM) performance with bandpass characteristics of stealth application. In this regard, a hybrid A-sandwich radome is proposed in this paper. The proposed radome consists of a novel strongly coupled frequency selective surface (FSS) core sandwiched between two dielectric layers (acts as skin) to form an A-sandwich structure. The dielectric layers are cascaded in such a way that the middle layer has less dielectric parameters than the skin dielectric. The core layer comprises a modified FSS array using strongly coupled FSS layers through a series of metallic vias. This strongly-coupled FSS element will have the advantage of eliminating inter-element interference and improves the EM performance characteristics of the structure. The structure exhibits very good band-pass characteristics (>90%) at a normal impinging angle with sharp roll-off characteristics. To show the efficacy of the proposed structure, the transmission loss has been compared with that of conventional A-sandwich radomes at 0°, 50° incidence angle for both TE and TM polarization. Conformal analysis of the unit cell has been carried out, and sector-wise thickness optimization was performed to analyze the structure for the conformal shaped radome application. Finally, a physical prototype has been fabricated and measured its scattering parameters, radiation characteristics in a fully shielded anechoic chamber. The results are encouraging and prove its suitability for radome application.
Influence of dielectric layers on performance of transmission mode frequency selective surface based linear to circular polarization transformers
