In recent years, the concept of reconfigurable antenna has been proposed. The reconfiguration of antenna performance is realized by adjusting the state of controllable devices integrated in the general radiation aperture. There are three methods to realize reconfiguration of antenna: electronic device reconfiguration (such as pin diode, radio frequency (RF) switches, varactor diode, etc.), mechanical reconfiguration and changing the material properties of the antenna.
Through the reconfigurable technologies, the performance of antenna can be transformed, such as the working frequency, polarization mode, radiation pattern and the combination of the above performance. However, many of the researches we mentioned above need complex hardware system design, requiring active components like PIN diodes, switches, and varactors, demanding high control complexity and cost. To explore a flexible and low-cost reconfigurable method, here, we present a metasurface antenna based on liquid metal for flexible scattering fields manipulation. A square-ring cavity structure has been designed, simulated and fabricated to demonstrate our design. By rotating and reconstructing the liquid metal shape, the reflected phase response of the element shows various distinct states, covering more than 270° phase range. We designed several phase distributions on the surface to generate the scattering beam in different directions. The measured results have good agreement with the simulation, verifying our design. We believe this work will stimulate more researches on reconfigurable and flexible designs utilizing liquid metal for diverse applications. The schematic of the presented reconfigurable metasurface antenna.
( a) The anomalous refraction under plane-wave incidence. ( b) The incident phase calculation of the point source feed.
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