Design of AMC-Based Metasurface Loaded Slot Antenna for Wideband RCS Reduction and Gain Improvement

In this work, an improvement in the radiation and scattering properties of the slot antenna is achieved by implementing a metasurface. To obtain wideband RCS reduction, an artificial magnetic conductor (AMC)-based metasurface is proposed. The proposed metasurface consists of the design of two different AMC unit cells such that the designed unit cells must have 180° ± 30° reflection phase difference in the wideband. The array of both the AMC unit cells are arranged in two configurations: checkerboard and pyramidal for RCS reduction in the wideband. Further, the proposed AMC metasurface is loaded on the split ring resonator (SRR) inspired slot antenna. The measured and simulated outcomes of the metasurface loaded antenna show that impedance bandwidth of the antenna is 9.9–10.5 GHz and the peak gain of the proposed antenna is enhanced by 1.61 dB as compared to the slot antenna. The designed antenna achieves an average RCS reduction of 5.2 dB within the band of 6.5–14.3 GHz while a 10-dB RCS reduction bandwidth of 30% is attained related to the reference slot antenna. The peak in-band RCS reduction of the proposed antenna is 27.9 dB at 10.3 GHz. The total properties of the slot antenna are improved by the implementation of the AMC metasurface.KeywordsArtificial Magnetic Conductor (AMC)Radar Cross-Section (RCS) reductionWideband slot antenna