Physical Optics Applied to Parallel-Plate Lens Antennas

The Physical Optics (PO) method is used to derive simplified expressions to compute the radiation electric fields of planar graded-index and geodesic lenses based on a parallel-plate waveguide (PPW) implementation. If the PO method is combined with ray-tracing (RT) techniques, the resulting RT-PO procedure is capable of computing radiation patterns and gain of the PPW-based lens antennas when their apertures have a general shape and the electric field is vertically polarized. The RT-PO method is validated by comparing it with the full-wave simulation results of the commercial software ANSYS HFSS for three application cases. The results show that the RT-PO approach is not only very efficient from a computational point of view but also accurate, thus being a very convenient analysis/design tool for this kind of antenna.