Efficient computation of 1-D periodic layered mixed potentials for the analysis of leaky-wave antennas with vertical elements

An efficient mixed-potential integral equation formulation is proposed for the analysis of one-dimensional (1-D) periodic leaky-wave antennas (LWAs) based on planar stratified configurations with inclusions of arbitrarily oriented metallic or dielectric perturbations. Both the transverse and vertical components of the mixed-potential Green’s functions due to a 1-D phased array of dipoles in a layered medium are computed through suitable homogeneous-medium asymptotic extractions from the standard spectral series of Floquet harmonics. An original acceleration procedure is applied for the computation of the vertical potentials, whose extracted terms can be expressed as potentials from a 1-D phased array of half-line sources in a homogeneous medium. Their numerical calculation requires a suitable modification of the Ewald method, thus resulting in new modified spectral and spatial series, having Gaussian convergence even in the case of complex modes and improper harmonics. Numerical comparisons for the 1-D periodic potentials, both in the case of bounded and unbounded (e.g., leaky) harmonics, validate the efficiency and accuracy of the proposed acceleration technique. The method is illustrated and verified by determining the dispersion behavior of both bound and leaky modes for several LWA test cases.