3-D Conformal Metasurfaces

This letter presents a method for mapping and fabricating metasurfaces on arbitrary 3-D surfaces. Metasurfaces are used for holographic leaky-wave antennas, reflectarray antennas, coatings for soft horn antennas, artificial magnetic conductors, high-impedance surfaces, frequency selective surfaces, electromagnetic band-gap structures, and surface-wave waveguides. They are typically fabricated as 2-D planar structures by printing a grid of metallic patches on a dielectric substrate, but for some applications, it is desirable to create a metasurface conformal to a 3-D surface. The methods presented here can be used with direct-write printing or with standard printed circuit board (PCB) techniques. The PCB method involves mapping the metasurface to a set of 2-D bands that are laminated to a 3-D substrate. As an example, a 3-D conformal, ellipsoidal, holographic, leaky-wave antenna was designed, fabricated, and measured.