Design of conformal tapered leaky wave antenna

The bend structure of leaky-wave antennas based on curve tapered design has been proposed and investigated. The new leaky-wave antenna (LWA) was designed running a simple procedure which use an FDTD code, and using a physical grounding structure along the length of the antenna, which allows to use only half of the structure, the adoption of a simple feeding, and the reduction of sidelobes. The good performance of this new tapered microstrip LWA are mainly wider band, higher gain, and higher efficiency whit reference to conventional uniform microstrip LWAs. Bending the curve tapered LWA, the major performance noticed of this antenna were the wider beam of radiation pattern and a further reduction of back lobes. Moreover since the tapering of linear LWA involves the variation of both phase and leakage constant, all the emitted rays are focused in a corresponding angular interval, allowing to obtain from the ray optical model a closed formula to predict the main beam angle of linear and curve taper LWA. Finally from theoretical analysis it should be appreciated that, as the relative dielectric constant of the substrate approaches 1, the leaky wave antenna bandwidth becomes much wider, improving its performance.