Sensitivity analysis of rectangular waveguides with different anisotropic surface impedance boundaries using modal extended theory

This article presents a sensitivity analysis of rectangular waveguides loaded with anisotropic surface impedance boundaries on their vertical walls, by using modal extended theory (MET). Using this method, several dispersion diagrams are computed for various anisotropic impedance boundary conditions of the surface walls of the waveguides in order to assess how the slight changes on the surface impedance can affect on the bandwidth and the fundamental cutoff frequency of the waveguide. The results obtained with MET were validated by comparison with the commercial software ANSYS HFSS. The results show that small anisotropic variations of the surface wall impedances lead to variation on the fundamental cutoff frequency and the bandwidth of the waveguide. Most significantly, and compared to an isotropic metasurface case, the variation of the transverse impedance of the metasurface is the one that have more significant effect over the waveguide parameters. This is an useful information for the metasurface design in order to take into account the fabrication tolerance of these structures and how they can have an influence over the final constructed device.