UC San Diego

Anisotropic impedance surfaces have been demonstrated to be useful for a variety of applications ranging from antennas, to surface wave guiding, to control of scattering. To increase their anisotropy requires elongated unit cells which have reduced symmetry and thus are not easily arranged into arbitrary patterns.

We'll discuss the limitations of existing patterning techniques and explore options for generating anisotropic impedance surfaces with arbitrary spatial variation. A new patterning technique, called a point-shifting method combined with a Voronoi cell generation technique, will be explained that allows a wide range of anisotropic impedance profiles. This approach can be used to produce patterns which include highly elongated cells with varying orientation, and cells which can smoothly transition between square, rectangular, hexagonal, and other shapes with a wide range of aspect ratios. Various applications fabricated by point sifting method will be introduced. Also, for validating designed surface impedances we'll discuss a new method to extract surface impedances from arbitrarily shaped patch cells using the moment of inertia equations.