2017 11th European Conference on Antennas and Propagation (EUCAP)

DragOnFly - Electronically Steerable Low Drag

Aeronautical Antenna
F. Silvestri1, A. Benini2, E. Gandini3, G. Gerini1, E. Martini2, S. Maci2, M. C. Viganò4, M. Geurts5, G. Toso6, S. Monni3
1
TNO, Delft, Netherlands, fabrizio.silvestri@tno.nl
2
University of Siena, Siena, Italy
3
TNO, The Hague, Netherlands
4
VIASAT, Lausanne, Switzerland
5
NXP Semiconductor, Eindhoven, Netherlands
6
ESA-ESTEC, Noordwijk, Netherlands

Abstract—This paper presents design considerations for the

development of wide-scanning antennas for on-craft satellite
communications. A scanning coverage of 80⁰ is required for
this application over a 15% fractional bandwidth in Ka-band.
A solution based on a phased array illuminating a passive
superstrate is identified as the most promising. A fully-
electronic beam-scanning is considered in order to reduce the
overall thickness of the antenna architecture by avoiding
mechanical rotational supports. This is beneficial for the
application since a reduced thickness corresponds to a lower
drag. Two kinds of superstrates were investigated, a flat
solution and a flattened dome. In both cases, the deflecting
structure is illuminated by a phased array and is represented
as a surface characterized by an optimized phase shift
distribution that allows to maintain a high gain level up to very
large scan angles. A flatter gain profile compared to a typical
cosine scan loss for planar phased arrays was achieved in both
cases. Attention was devoted to the minimization of the Fig. 1. Schematic representation of the scenario. Depending on the flying
thickness, which was significantly reduced in comparison to sector of the aircraft, the antenna scan angle needed to point to the satellite
classical dielectric dome solutions. can change significantly.
Index Terms—Satellite communications, dome antennas,
beam deflector. this results in a thick structure protruding from the aircraft
therefore affecting its aerodynamics.
For this reason, a fully electronic beam-scanning solution
I. INTRODUCTION
is of interest because it can allow a significant thickness
Inter-continental flights need a large beam-steering reduction. Phased arrays are commonly used to achieve
capability in order to keep the connection with the satellite electronic beam-scanning. However, the required wide-angle
while travelling over different sectors of the earth globe, Fig. scan becomes an issue since the variation of the antenna
1. Moreover, the increasing use of satellite communications input impedance causes significant mismatch. Moreover, the
all around the world has pushed the development in Ka-band, geometrical reduction of the gain with the cosine of the
where more capacity is available compared to Ku-band. Ka- elevation angle further compromises the performance for far
band space-based communications are recognized as the out scanning. The idea of this work is to use an array with
immediate future for satellite systems and this is highlighted limited scanning capability (i.e. up to 60°) and combine it
by the evolution of launched satellites with Ka-band with an additional architecture that enables the required field
capabilites. of view enlargement (70°-80°).
The ESA ARTES project DragOnFly aims to develop a A possible solution that addresses the impedance
solution for a low drag electronically steerable array antenna mismatch is to use a wide angle impedance matching
operating with wide field of view (> 60°) over a 15% (WAIM) layer. This can be realized by adding a thin
fractional frequency bandwidth at the Ka-band. At present, dielectric layer over the array [2]. This solution, however,
mechanical beam-steering is the preferred technique [1]. does not allow maintaining the matching over the required
Such architectures are bulky because they require space to field of view. Recently, metamaterial based solutions were
accommodate the mechanical rotational system. Since the proposed, [3], [4]. These works show that the matching for
antenna has to be placed outside the fuselage of the plane, wide scanning in both principal planes can be significantly
improved. However, the theoretically needed material

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 2017 11th European Conference on Antennas and Propagation (EUCAP)
parameters can be practically obtained over a very limited
bandwidth, making them unsuited for the current application.
Another possible solution, addressing instead the
geometrical gain loss, is the use of a deflector combined with
a phased array with limited scanning capabilities. Two
interesting concepts are represented by planar lenses and
dome antennas. Planar lenses have the major advantage of
being low profile [5], [6]. However, their scanning
capabilities are limited (i.e. 60° in [5]) when compared to the
described requirements. The bandwidth can also be an issue
when such lenses are designed using metamaterial solutions
[6]. Dielectric dome antennas illuminated by linear or planar
arrays [7], [8] show good performance up to 70° scanning
and they have no bandwidth limitation. The operational
frequency band is then dictated by the illuminating array.
The main drawback of such solution is the overall thickness
of the structure. For example, in the implementations
presented in [8] the dome is always at least as high as the
array length.
In this contribution, an attempt is made to combine the
benefits of planar lenses and dome antennas. In particular,
the characterization of a flat deflector is shown in Sec. II,
whereas, in Sec. III, a “flattened” curved dome configuration
is presented. In both cases, the deflecting structure is
illuminated by a phased array and is represented as a surface
characterized by an optimized phase shift distribution that
allows maintaining a high gain level up to very large scan
angles. The practical implementation of the deflector can be
done by using metasurfaces (MTSs) [9] or shaped dielectric
domes [8].
II. PLANAR DEFLECTOR
A planar superstrate, defined as a phase shift distribution,
can be used to achieve the desired scanning. A limited
scanning array antenna is used to illuminate the deflector that
introduces the field of view enlargement. The architecture
composed by the array and the superstrate is shown in Fig. 2.
The analysis of the structure is based on a ray-tracing
approach. In particular, each ray exits the array tilted by a
different angle θi. The superstrate is defined by a phase shift
distribution ψ(x) that deviates the incoming rays to the
desired scan direction θo. The amount of deviation is
computed according to [7]:
sin + = sin (1)
The output directions of the rays from the array is arbitrary
and can be defined by properly phasing the array elements.
Therefore, the problem consists in the definition of three
parameters, the phase distributions of the array elements, the
phase shift introduced by the superstrate and the distance
between the array and the superstrate. The phase shift
distribution of the superstrate and its distance from the array
are the same for all the scan angles. Indeed, the superstrate is
designed to be passive. Instead, the phase of each element of
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Fig. 2. Schematic representation of a limited scanning array antenna
combined with a planar deflector to enlarge the field of view.
the array is considered as independently controlled and may
change for every considered scan angle.
Based on the proposed configuration, an optimization
routine has been developed. The function to be optimized is
the gain of the antenna, defined as
( )= ( )× ( )× ( ) (2)
where k0 is the wavenumber in free space, Leff(θo) =
Ls(θo)×cos(θo) is the effective radiating length (Fig. 2), ηa(θo)
and ηp(θo) are the aperture and pointing efficiencies,
respectively. The aperture efficiency accounts for the fact
that the rays on the superstrate might be non-uniformly
distributed [7], whereas, the pointing efficiency quantifies
the effect of rays that are not tilted to the desired scanning
angle.
The superstrate has an even phase profile to allow the
scanning to negative and positive angles and it is defined by
a conic equation plus higher order polynomials terms
( )= +∑ (3)
( )
where and represent the curvature and conic constant of
the conic profile and the parameters are the weights of the
higher order polynomial terms. These parameters are the
variables of the optimization process to maximize the gain
over the required scanning range.
Another important design parameter is the distance
between the array and the superstrate, in Fig. 2. In general,
the further the superstrate is from the array, the simpler the
performance optimization. This results directly from the fact
that different areas of the superstrate can be optimized almost
independently for different scan angles. However, one of the
project requirements is to make the architecture as low
profile as possible. Decreasing reduces the size of the areas
that can be independently optimized, thus degrading the
performance over the required scanning range. Therefore, a
trade-off between the thickness and the performance has to
be taken into account.
A linear array of length = 30 at f0 = 30 GHz was
considered in the optimization. The array is assumed to be
able to scan from −60 to +60∘ with good impedance
matching. The output scan range to be achieved was defined
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 2017 11th European Conference on Antennas and Propagation (EUCAP)
Fig. 3. Gain as a function of the scan angle for the planar deflector.
as = −80 + 80∘ . The distance between the array and
the superstrate was constrained to be less than the length of
the array, . This limit was imposed to achieve a total
profile thinner than the state-of-the-art architectures using a
dielectric dome to enhance the field of view of array
antennas with a thickness [8].
The phase shift profile of the superstrate was optimized
using an iterative procedure. In particular, a desired gain
shape as a function of the scan angle was assigned as input,
( ). Then, the parameters of the phase definition in Eq.
(2) and the distance were optimized so that
Some considerations have to be taken into account before
defining the desired gain profile. In order to achieve a gain
enhancement with respect to the ideal cosine scan loss
profile (geometrical loss), the superstrate has to be larger
than the array. In this case, the rays coming from the array
can spread over the entire superstrate length, increasing the
aperture of the antenna. However, the same aperture
enlargement cannot be achieved over the entire scan range.
Therefore, in order to enlarge the gain for large scan angles,
the gain at broadside has to be traded and a reasonable gain
decrease must be introduced. The gain profile used in the
optimization is shown in Fig. 3, black dot-dashed line and
compared to a cosine gain profile, black solid line. A 2 dB
gain enhancement at = 80∘ is envisaged. The cost is a
gain reduction of 1.5 dB at broadside.
The result of the optimization process is also shown in
Fig. 3, light blue curve, showing excellent agreement with
the pre-defined mask. The distance between the array and the
superstrate is = 0.6 and the superstrate is 3 times larger
than the array. This allows for the aperture enlargement
required to enhance the gain at wide scan angles.
III. FLATTENED DOME
The second approach is based on the deflecting dome
concept, but, instead of using a dielectric structure of
variable thickness, it makes use of a thin curved screen
realized through MTSs [9]. A 2D structure, consisting of a
linear array of line sources and of an ideal screen of
Fig. 4. Geometry of the array and dome configuration.
Fig. 5. Ray representation of the behavior of the system array and dome in
the reciprocal problem. The red cross denotes a ray that is falling outside
the array extent and is therefore neglected.
infinitesimal thickness is considered here to illustrate the
concept. The dome shape is set to be a portion of
hemisphere, with the objective to reduce the overall
. thickness of the radiating structure. The insertion phase
distribution on the screen is designed to increase the scan
range of the array by properly bending the incoming rays.
The procedure leading to the synthesis of this insertion
phase consists of a number of steps. In the first step, the
elements of the array are excited with equal amplitude and
linear phase. Different pointing angles contained in the scan
range achievable by the array (i.e. -60°-+60°) are considered
in this step. For the generic i-th phasing of the array, ray
tracing is performed to find the point ( xQi , j , yQi , j ) where
the ray launched from the j-th array element intercepts the
dome (Fig. 4). The generalized law of refraction (1) is then
applied to find the condition on the phase shift introduced
by the dome needed to bend the incoming ray in the desired
direction.
The obtained function can be integrated to obtain the
distribution of insertion phase to be introduced by the
metaradome. This way, a different phase distribution is
obtained for each scanning angle.
In the second step, starting from the phase shift
distributions obtained in the first step, a unique distribution
is chosen, and imposed for all the scanning angles. It is
noted that, having set a unique insertion phase distribution
across the metaradome, not all the rays will go in the desired
directions if the array is excited with a linear phasing.
To solve this problem, in the third step an “inverse
procedure” is applied, again based on the geometrical
optics, but in a reciprocal sense. Rays impinging on the
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structure from the outside at the desired angle are
considered; at the points of intersection with the
metaradome, the generalized Snell law is applied to obtain
the direction of the rays emerging in the inner part. Then, by
applying ray tracing, the points where these rays intersect
the array are found (Fig. 5). Rays falling outside the array
will be neglected.
This procedure allows us to identify for each element of the
array the required direction of the emerging ray. In fact, by
reciprocity, if the rays are launched by the array in the
directions defined by the previous procedure, all the rays
emerging from the dome will be aligned in the desired
direction. More specifically, the derivative of the array
phasing is related to the impinging angle through the
relation
Φ′Aj = −k − sin θ Aj
The integration of this relationship provides the phase of the
array excitation to be applied. It is noted that different
solutions will be found for any scan angle. The deviation of
this excitation phase from linearity allows one to correct for
the pointing errors found in the second step.
Finally, in the last step, the performances of the radiating
system are evaluated by applying a Physical Optics
approach. Namely, the array elements are excited with equal
amplitude and the phase determined in the previous step.
The field impinging on the dome is calculated by applying a
geometrical optics approach; the transmitted field is
obtained by adding at each point the corresponding insertion
phase (assuming no insertion losses) and the radiated field is
determined through a radiation integral performed over the
dome surface.
In the considered example, the frequency and the length
of the linear array are the same as in the previous case ( =
30 at f0 = 30 GHz). The array is assumed to be able to
scan from −60 to +60∘ and the output scan range to be
achieved was defined from = −80 to + 80∘ . The
maximum distance of the dome from the array is equal to
= 7.5 , i.e. one fourth of the array length. Fig. 6 shows
the radiation pattern for a desired scan angle of 80°. The
green curve represents the radiation pattern. of the array
(excited with the designed phase distortion) without the
dome, the red one represents the radiation pattern with the
dome and the blue one is relevant to the case of the array
excited with a linear phase corresponding to a scanning
angle of = +80∘ (without the screen). This latter case is
affected by the presence of grating lobes. This problem is
overcome by the introduction of the deflecting dome.
3426
10 array pointing at 60° without dome
array with dome
linear phase array pointing at 80° without dome
0
Directivity [dB]
-10
-20
-30
-80 -60 -40 -20 0
θ [Deg]
20 40 60 80
Fig. 6. Radiation pattern for a pointing angle of 80°.
IV. CONCLUSION
Design considerations for the development of wide-
scanning antennas for on-craft satellite communications were
presented in this contribution. The described solutions are
based on a configuration in which a phased array illuminates
a deflector. Two kinds of superstrates were investigated, a
flat solution and a flattened dome. A ray-tracing based
analysis was adopted for both architectures. Theoretical
results showed that a gain increase can be achieved for very
large scan angles, up to 80⁰. The results show the potential of
such solutions to achieve fully electronical beam-steering,
allowing a thickness reduction compared to the current state-
of-the-art solutions based on mechanical scanning.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The Author would like to thank the European Space
Agency for the support in framework of the ESA ARTES
project DragOnFly.
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