Design, additive manufacturing fabrication, and experimental validation of a composite conformal non-convex metasurface [Invited]

In honor of Professor Nader Engheta, a sinusoidally shaped metasurface made from the juxtaposition of the letters comprising his first name is designed, fabricated, and measured in an anechoic chamber. The N-A-D-E-R metasurface is designed to reflect a normally incident plane wave to an angle of 30 ∘ with respect to the broadside of the metasurface. It is designed using a custom surface integral equation solver coupled with an adjoint variable optimizer. This synthesis process produces the specifications for a conformal patterned metallic cladding necessary to perform the wavefront transformation as an output. The conformal cladding is then realized using printed silver inks deposited on the N-A-D-E-R-shaped acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS) dielectric spacer in an additive manufacturing stage. The finalized prototype is then measured for scattering performance in an anechoic chamber. The measurements show good agreement with the performance predicted by the design stage.