A partially ferrite-filled rectangular waveguide with CRLH response and its application to a magnetically scannable antenna

In this paper, a partially ferrite-loaded rectangular waveguide is proposed as a periodic transmission line. Based on the modal analysis and the calculated dispersion diagram, this structure has a magnetically tunable composite right/left-handed (CRLH) response. As an application of this CRLH structure, a novel magnetically scannable antenna is presented with fixed and multi frequency beam scanning capability. Compared to the conventional ferrite-based antenna, the efficiency of the proposed antenna is high. In addition, there is not any mechanical switch or electrical tuning chip in the proposed scannable antenna. The simulation results show that the proposed antenna can be scanned from −23 to 40 degrees where the minimum antenna radiation realized gain is 14 dB. This work can be used as a first step in the design of a high performance reconfigurable scannable antenna in future investigations.