Design of Multilayer Frequency-Selective Surfaces by Equivalent Circuit Method and Basic Building Blocks

An equivalent circuit method (ECM) is proposed for the design of multilayer frequency-selective surfaces (FSSs). In contrast to the existing ECMs that were developed mainly for the analysis of the properties of a given FSS, the presented ECM aims at providing the initial design parameters of an FSS from the desired frequency response. In this method, four types of basic FSS structures are used as the building blocks to construct the multilayer FSSs, and their surface impedances in both the normal- and the oblique-incidence situations are studied in detail in order to achieve more accurate equivalent circuit (EC) representation of the entire FSS. For a general FSS design with expected frequency response, the EC parameters and the geometrical sizes of the required basic building blocks can be synthesized from a few typical S-parameter (S₁₁/S₁₂) samplings of the response curves via a simple least-square curve-fitting process. The effectiveness and accuracy of the method are shown by the designs of a band-pass FSS with steep falling edge and a miniaturized band-pass FSS with out-of-band absorption. The prototype of one design is fabricated, and the measured frequency response agrees well with the numerical results of the ECM and the full-wave simulations.