Cascaded Modeling of Metasurface Antennas for Microwave Applications

Metasurface antennas use tunable components to enable electronic beamforming from a lightweight, low-cost, and planar platform. However, their electrically large size and subwavelength features present computational challenges for modeling with commercial, full-wave solvers. In this work, we present an approximate dipole model that uses the experimentally characterized or simulated response of a single metamaterial element to efficiently model full metasurface antennas. This model enables the rapid prediction of the response of large metasurface antennas, which can be used to inform the design process or to determine the optimal experimental tuning states for fabricated antennas. Metasurface antennas, which can leverage this method, offer the potential to improve the hardware platforms for many microwave applications ranging from computational imaging and communications to remote sensing.