Composite right/left-handed leaky-wave antenna for concave surfaces

In this paper a novel conformal composite right/left-handed (CRLH) leaky-wave antenna (LWA) for concave surface application is introduced. The effect of conformation of a planar CRLH LWA on a concave surface is investigated. For this purpose, a 25-cell planar CRLH LWA has been fabricated and mounted inside a cylindrical concave surface with a radius of 20 cm. it will be shown that conforming the planar antenna results in degradation of its performance mainly by widening the main radiation beam. In this case, dispersion engineering comes to the rescue by taking advantage of the structure´s right-handed and left-handed properties to modify the conformal structure to refocus the main radiation beam and obtain comparable result to the planar version.