A tapered design of a CRLH-TL Leaky wave antenna

Recently composite right/left-handed (CRLH) leaky-wave antennas (LWAs) have been shown as one of the applications of the CRLH transmission line (TL) metamaterials thanks to their advantages of fabrication simplicity and frequency/electrically scanning capability without any complex feeding network. Neverthless the fixed geometrical size of a unit cell of the CRLH-TL Leaky-wave antennas, prevents the possibility to improve the antenna bandwidth “tapering” the geometrical size of unit cell. This paper presents a realization of composite right/left handed transmission lines LWA using different size of unit cell to design a single antenna. This structure exploits the advantages of a classic CRLH leaky-wave antennas, while increases the bandwidth. The performance of this tapered composite right/left-handed line were demonstrated by both simulated and measured results, and they show good agreement.