Vivaldi Antenna Design With Frequency Selective Surfaces for GPR Applications

Abstract

Due to their high performance qualities, vivaldi antenna designs are employed in numerous communication applications, including ground penetrating radar. Due to its high gain and wide band properties, the Vivaldi antenna is one of the most commonly utilized antenna design for Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) applications. However such designs often require for a huge design area or a smaller size with poorer performance metrics. More and more focus has recently been placed on Frequency Selective Surfaces (FSS) designs with unit cell widths considerably lower than the operation wavelength. The interactions between the unit cells are what give the structure the desired FSS properties. Here, a unique design with FSS loaded structures is suggested to have a high performance wide-band Vivaldi antenna for GPR application. The obtained performance results are benchmarked with results from literature. As a result the proposed antenna has a high gain performance (13.6 dBi) within the operation range of 0.6-4 GHz.