SCATTERING AND COUPLING REDUCTION OF DIPOLE ANTENNA USING GRADIENT INDEX METAMATERIAL BASED CLOAK

A gradient index metamaterial (GIM) based conformal cloak is utilized to reduce the overall scattering of a dipole antenna and its blockage effect when being placed in close proximity of a horn antenna. The reduction in scattering is attributed to wave conversion properties of GIM cover, by virtue of which the propagating waves get converted to surface waves and vice versa, thus reducing the scattering signature of the dipole. The GIM cover also has the advantage of larger bandwidth than single metasurface based cloaks (mantle cloak). The proposed GIM based cloak proves to be effective in reducing the mutual interference between dipole and horn antenna without disrupting the performance of individual antennas in their respective frequency band of interest. The Ansys HFSS simulation results are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of GIM based cover to reduce mutual blockage effect between a low band dipole and an S-band horn antenna.