Hybrid Ray Tracing Method for Microwave Lens Simulation

Microwave lenses such as the Bootlace/Rotman lenses are designed by placing physical ports of lens input on the theoretical phase centers. These phase center positions are calculated using geometrical optic method under the assumptions of perfect cylindrical waves and true time delay. A real physical lens does not satisfy these conditions due to different port implementation approaches and mutual coupling effects. Full wave investigations and measurements have indicated strong variation at both phase and amplitude couplings between the input and output ports. Efficient theoretical models predicting both phase and amplitude performances are still in great demand to perform advanced lens optimization. The full wave simulation demonstrates accurate results. However, it is not convenient in optimization iterations due to its high computational cost and sophisticated programming process. Based on a ray tracing concept recently explored by the authors, this paper extends its design and formulate a suitable approach for general lens simulation. A microwave lens is systematically treated by hybrid of a flexible tapered port model and multiple-ray-path coupling approach. This method leads to designing the minimum return loss tapered port and fast lens simulation of reasonable accuracy. The predicted results of amplitude, phase couplings, array factors are validated by both full wave simulation and measurement. The comparison shows that the proposed method is fast, accurate and sufficient to predict various microwave lens parameters. This concept can be extended to designing stripline and waveguide lenses as well.