Printed planar tunable composite right/left‐handed leaky‐wave antenna based on a tunable polymer‐BST substrate.

This article presents a printed tunable right/left‐handed leaky wave antenna (LWA) on a new flexible, tunable low density polyethylene‐barium strontium titanate composite substrate using an aerosol jet printer. The new substrate had a dielectric constant of 16 and tunability of 3.5% at f = 10 GHz. Interdigital capacitors (IDC) were utilized in the leaky wave antenna design not only to act as shunt capacitor in CRLH transmission line design but also as tunability element to implement tuning capability of the LDPE‐BST substrate for antenna beam steerability for a fixed operated frequency in X‐band frequency range. Up to 15° beam steering was achieved by applying DC voltage through the printed leaky wave antenna. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]