Modeling of a Negative Refractive Index Metamaterial Unit-Cell and Array for Aircraft Surveillance Applications

In this paper, a unique negative refractive index-metamaterial (NRI-MTM) structure is proposed for traffic alert and collision avoidance system (TCAS) for aircraft application. The NRI-MTM unit-cell structure is a combination of square and circular split ring structures. The proposed square and circular split ring metamaterial (SCM) is designed on the top of a 1.6 mm thick FR-4 substrate, with a single circular split ring on the bottom of the substrate. The total dimension of the SCM unit-cell is 23 $\times $ 23mm2 ( $0.08\lambda \,\,\times \,\,0.08 \lambda$ ), resonating at 1.06 GHz. This unit-cell is further used to create a 5 $\times $ 4 array structure with a dimension of 130 $\times $ 111mm2 ( $0.46\lambda \,\,\times \,\,0.4 \lambda$ ). A High-Frequency Structure Simulator (HFSS) is used to assess the electromagnetic properties of the proposed structures. Furthermore, in order to analyse the double negative (DNG) behaviour of the designed SCM structure, the unit-cell is rotated from 0 to 360 degrees with a step of 60 degrees along the azimuthal plane. On doing so, it is observed that, the proposed SCM structures, including unit-cell and array structures, exhibit DNG and NRI properties over the frequency band of 0.5 to 1.2 GHz, thus making it optimum for aircraft surveillance application. The SCM unit-cell and 5 $\times $ 4 SCM array structure were fabricated, and the measured results are in well agreement with the simulated results. Further, the array structure is used as a superstrate on the patch antenna to analyze the impact of the MTM on the antenna performance. In comparison to the antenna without the MTM structure, the $5\times $ 4 SCM array loaded antenna has a gain improvement of 2.8dB and a bandwidth enhancement of 31.5MHz.