Luneburg lens with extended flat focal surface for electronic scan applications

Luneburg lens with flat focal surface has been developed to work together with planar antenna feeds for beam steering applications. According to our analysis of the conventional flattened Luneburg lens, it cannot accommodate enough feeding elements which can cover its whole scan range with half power beamwidths (HPBWs). In this paper, a novel Luneburg lens with extended flat focal surface is proposed based on the theory of Quasi-Conformal Transformation Optics (QCTO), with its beam steering features reserved. To demonstrate this design, a three-dimensional (3D) prototype of this novel extend-flattened Luneburg lens working at Ku band is fabricated based on 3D printing techniques, whose flat focal surface is attached to a 9-element microstrip antenna array to achieve different scan angles. Our measured results show that, with different antenna elements being fed, the HPBWs can cover the whole scan range.