Compact Air-Filled Luneburg Lens Antennas Based on Almost-Parallel Plate Waveguide Loaded with Equal-Sized Metallic Posts

This paper presents a Luneburg lens and a Luneburg reflector lens along with the corresponding compact and cost-effective multibeam antennas in the Ka-band. The Luneburg lens is composed of an air-filled parallel plate waveguide (PPW) loaded with equal-sized metallic posts. The upper plate of the PPW is designed to a curved surface to meet the requirement of the equivalent refractive index profile, meanwhile providing a transition between the lens and the feed waveguide. Also, based on the law of reflection, a reflecting wall is introduced to the Luneburg lens to achieve a Luneburg reflector lens. By employing the WR28 rectangular waveguides as the feeders, the Luneburg lens/reflector lens antennas with single beam and multiple beams are designed and experimentally verified in the whole Ka-band. The multibeam Luneburg lens antenna show the beam scanning from -45° to +45° with 0.6 dB scan loss. The multibeam Luneburg reflector lens antenna show the beam scanning from 30° to 60° with 0.7 dB scan loss. Besides, the acceptable performances of aperture efficiency, impedance matching and multiport isolation are achieved. The results indicate that the works in this paper have application potential in the millimeter-wave (mmW) wireless communications.