Wide-Angle Beam Scanning Phased Array Consisting of Cylindrical Dielectric Resonator Antennas

In this paper, the design method for a wide-angle beam scanning phased array consisting of cylindrical dielectric resonator antenna (CDRA) elements is proposed. The CDRA element is designed to work at HEM11 delta mode, which produces wide-beam radiation patterns of 145 degrees in the E-plane. Moreover, thanks to the high permittivity of the CDRA, the mutual coupling between the array elements is very small. Based on these critical features, the wide beam scanning range of the phased array can be achieved. A prototype sample of phased array consisting of 13 CDRA elements E-plane is designed and simulated. Results show that the radiation direction of the array can scan from -70 degrees to +70 degrees with a directivity fluctuation less than 1.5 dB, and the array supports the 3dB beam coverage from -82 degrees to +82 degrees. Over the whole scanning rang, the sidelobe level (SLL) is lower than -10 dB and the cross polarization is smaller than -38 dB.