Material-by-Design Synthesis of Conformal Miniaturized Linear Phased Arrays

In this paper, the design of high performance conformal radiating structures is addressed within the Material-by-Design (MbD) paradigm. Toward this end, a new synthesis technique based on the innovative integration of a generalized quasi-conformal transformation optics and a source inversion procedure is proposed to fit linear phased arrays to smaller and arbitrarily-shaped surfaces. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first time that a design methodology simultaneously achieves (i) a simplification of the antenna layout through the reduction of its aperture and number of elements and (ii) its conformal transformation in order to match the aerodynamics of the hosting structure without affecting the required radiation features. It is worth remarking that the synthesized architectures are not only conformal, but they also provide the same performances of larger and straight layouts that could not be directly fitted to the available support. Some representative results are shown and discussed in order to validate the effectiveness of the proposed MbD methodology, as well as to highlight its current limitations.