Ray Tracing Algorithm for Dielectric Domes

Abstract: Almost hemispherical scanning capabilities are required for modern wireless communication systems to produce broad coverage without performance degradation. Phased array antennas are commonly used as a fully-electronic beam-steering solution for its rapidity in beam switching. However, the effective aperture for high scanning angles is reduced, causing a reduction of the gain with the cosine of the elevation angle. Quasi-optical systems are used to achieve high directivity for wide scanning in combination with phased arrays. An interesting solution is the dielectric dome antenna, where rotationally symmetric dielectric lenses are used to enhance the scanning performance of an antenna with limited scanning capabilities. Using a full-wave simulator to evaluate lenses combined with arrays is very time-consuming, making the lens design inefficient and laborious. In this work is presented a Ray-Tracing tool used to simulate in a fast and efficient way the far-field of two-dimensional dielectric lenses. While a full-wave simulation of a three-dimensional lens could take approximately 3 hours, the Ray-Tracing evaluation takes less than 3 minutes, making possible the full optimization and design of these lenses. A numerical calculation of the ray path is used to evaluate the phase of the electric field at the lens aperture, while the amplitude is evaluated using ray-tube power theory. The far-field radiation pattern of the lens antenna is calculated using the Kirchhoff-Fresnel diffraction formula. In this work, it is also presented a full study of the reflection and absorption losses, which is something that was not previously done in the state of the art. Matching layers are designed and evaluated to reduce the reflection losses at each interface. To demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach, we compare the radiation patterns produced by a two-dimensional dielectric dome antenna with those computed using COMSOL, showing a significant reduction in time and computational resources.