UC San Diego

Anisotropic artificial impedance surfaces are a group of planar materials that can be modeled by the tensor impedance boundary condition. This boundary condition relates the electric and magnetic field components on a surface using a 2x2 tensor. The advantage of using the tensor impedance boundary condition, and by extension anisotropic artificial impedance surfaces, is that the method allows large and complex structures to be modeled quickly and accurately using a planar boundary condition. This thesis presents the theory of anisotropic impedance surfaces and multiple applications. Anisotropic impedance surfaces are a generalization of scalar impedance surfaces. Unlike the scalar version, anisotropic impedance surfaces have material properties that are dependent on the polarization and wave vector of electromagnetic radiation that interacts with the surface. This allows anisotropic impedance surfaces to be used for applications that scalar surfaces cannot achieve. Three of these applications are presented in this thesis. The first is an anisotropic surface wave waveguide which allows propagation in one direction, but passes radiation in the orthogonal direction without reflection. The second application is a surface wave beam shifter which splits a surface wave beam in two directions and reduces the scattering from an object placed on the surface. The third application is a patterned surface which can alter the scattered radiation pattern of a rectangular shape. For each application, anisotropic impedance surfaces are constructed using periodic unit cells. These unit cells are designed to give the desired surface impedance characteristics by modifying a patterned metallic patch on a grounded dielectric substrate. Multiple unit cell geometries are analyzed in order to find the setup with the best performance in terms of impedance characteristics and frequency bandwidth