† Corresponding author. E-mail:
Project supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 61701349), the Natural Science Foundation of Shandong Province, China (Grant Nos. ZR2017QF012 and ZR2017MF042), and the Program for the Top Young Innovative Talents, China (Grant No. Q1313-03).
Active metamaterials incorporating with non-Foster elements have been considered as one of the means of overcoming inherent limitations of the passive counterparts, thus achieving broadband or gain metamaterials. However, realistic active metamaterials, especially non-Foster loaded medium, would face the challenge of the possibility of instability. Moreover, they normally appear to be time-variant and in unsteady states, which leads to the necessity of a stability method to cope with the stability issue considering the system model uncertainty. In this paper, we propose an immittance-based stability method to design a non-Foster loaded metamaterial ensuring robust stability. First, the principle of this stability method is introduced after comparing different stability criteria. Based on the equivalent system model, the stability characterization is used to give the design specifications to achieve an active metamaterial with robust stability. Finally, it is applied to the practical design of active metamaterial with non-Foster loaded loop arrays. By introducing the disturbance into the non- Foster circuit (NFC), the worst-case model uncertainty is considered during the design, and the reliability of our proposed method is verified. This method can also be applied to other realistic design of active metamaterials.
Since Veselago introduced the concept of left-handed (LH) medium with simultaneous negative permittivity (ε) and permeability (μ),[1] the development of artificially engineered materials or metamaterials has been a subject of growing interest for both engineers and physicists due to their possible ability of designing and building novel devices.[2–4] It was shown that the realization of conventional metamaterials implies the use of the resonant structures,[5,6] which leads to the fact that the “negative” or “near-zero” material properties (ε and μ) are possible only within a narrow frequency band near the resonance, resulting in highly dispersive and lossy metamaterials. To overcome these limitations, a fair amount of attention has been paid to the design of novel metamaterials such as thermal metamaterials,[7] digital metamaterials,[8,9] and active metamaterials.[10,11] Particularly, active metamaterials by incorporating non-Foster circuits have attracted much attention due to their potential to break through the fundamental limits of passive metamaterials.[12,13]
To the best of our knowledge, the original idea of employing non-Foster elements to design the broadband metamaterials was theoretically proposed by Tretyakov.[10] However, the history of non-Foster antennas dates back to the 1930s when Bell lab applied the technique to reducing the size of relay coils in its early telephony systems.[14] Typically, non-Foster elements refer to negative lumped elements (i.e., negative capacitance, and negative inductance). Their reactance-versus-frequency slopes are negative, which are opposite to those of the ordinary positive lumped elements. Moreover, they are always realized by non-Foster circuits (NFCs). In Ref. [10], it was shown analytically that the loading of a short dipole with a negative capacitance would lead to the wideband non-dispersive ENG (ε-negative) behavior, meanwhile, the loading of a small loop with a negative inductance can lead to wideband dispersionless MNG (μ-negative) behavior. Although the subsequent theoretical study[15] illustrated the inherent instabilities of non-dispersive ENG and MNG metamaterials based on non-Foster elements, there had been a few studies about the realization of broadband MNG or MNZ (μ-near-zero) metamaterials with non-Foster loads,[11] in which both the stability and bandwidth enhancement were successfully achieved. Particularly, in Refs. [16] and [17], the Nyquist stability criterion was used to design an actively-loaded material which is capable of modeling the practical NFC circuits, including their parasitics and nonlinearities. Based on Cauchy’s argument principle,[18] the product of the source impedance and load admittance forms a closed contour in the complex plane. By inspecting the encirclements of the point (−1, 0), formed by the Nyquist contour, the stability of the system at a given operating point can be assessed.
In-depth investigation reveals that the Nyquist stability analysis also suffer some limitations. One drawback is that this technique cannot be used to formulate design specifications. Another drawback is that it can treat only a steady-state system. Some newly proposed stability methods for non-Foster loaded networks show the same problems.[19,20] However, for most electric systems, their performances are always limited by the system model uncertainty due to the perturbations, thus time-variant and unsteady-states appear. These perturbed objects include the parameter variation, steady-state error, time delay and noise. Thus, in the modern industry, to achieve a robust stability and keep the system stable up to the worst-case model uncertainty is a very important part of the design procedures. This also holds for active metamaterials, especially for non-Foster loaded metamaterials.
Due to these drawbacks mentioned above, in this paper we propose an immittance-based stability method, so as to break through these limitations, and achieve a non-Foster loaded active metamaterials while ensuring robust stability. This method can also be applied to the design of other active systems with non-Foster elements. After making a comparison between different stability criteria proposed in control theory, the principle of the immittance-based stability analysis is illustrated with respect to a closed-loop transfer function. With the specified gain boundary and phase boundary, the stability robustness of the system can be manipulated. Meanwhile, the original transfer function is modified in accordance with the cascaded source-load system we will use in this work. Subsequent to the application, an equivalent system model considering the system model uncertainty of a non-Foster loaded loop in a finite array is provided at first. Using the immittance-based stability characterization, the design specifications to achieve a stable non-Foster loaded active metamaterial are analytically derived which satisfy the specified robust stability conditions. These conditions are given by means of phase limitation and gain limitation as discussed in the principle illustration. Finally, the stability method is applied to the practical design of active metamaterials by physically realizing the non-Foster loads through using the resonant tunneling diode (RTD)-based NFC. The system model uncertainty is considered by introducing the disturbance into the RTD component. By inspecting the Nyquist curves of both disturbed and undisturbed models in the complex frequency plane, the robust stability of the system is verified. Furthermore, the effective parameters of the proposed active medium are extracted based on the system model of the single unit cell.
The rest of this paper is organized as follows. The principle of immittance-based stability analysis is introduced in Section
So far, the stability analysis of time-varying networks has been extensively studied and lots of papers have derived various kinds of criteria for the stability problem.[21–32] Moreover, their principles are scalable and applicable to a wide range of active systems.Based on these principles, we may propose an immittance-based stability analysis method to analyze the stability of an active network with system uncertainty. For illustration, a cascaded source-load system is presented as shown in Fig.
Another important application of the immittance-based stability analysis is that it can be used to formulate design specifications. That is, with the given source impedance (or load admittance), all possible operating points of the load admittance (or source impedance) can be obtained by keeping the Nyquist plots away from the forbidden region in the complex plane. This leads to a number of stability criteria, such as the opposing argument criterion,[21,22] Middlebrook criterion,[23] gain and phase margin (GMPM) criterion,[24] and the energy source analysis consortium (ESAC) criterion.[25,26] All these criteria determine various forbidden regions as shown in Fig.
A synthesization of the GMPM and ESAC criterion could lead to a more effective immittance-based stability analysis which has been proposed in Ref. [33]. We observe that this stability method is of potential significance for designing the active systems with non-Foster elements, although it is initially introduced for control system stability evaluation. Like the ESAC criterion, this stability method can also provide a less conservative forbidden region with the predefined conditions for robust stability. Moreover, it is able to formulate the design specifications serving as the GMPM criterion with the specified stability conditions.
For a control system with model uncertainty, its linear model can be expressed in the following form:[33]
For a cascaded source-load system as shown in Fig.
In this section, the proposed immittance-based stability method is employed to provide the design specifications of a practical non-Foster loaded active metamaterial while ensuring robust stability. First, the equivalent system model of the active metamaterials is presented. The analytic stability bounds of the non-Foster circuit based on the system model are then studied to make the unsteady-state system stable with the assumed model uncertainty. Finally, an experimental demonstration with practical NFC design is provided for validation.
In Ref. [11], it was suggested that periodic loops with non-Foster loads could be used to create a stable low-dispersion MNG or MNZ metamaterials, although in practice the choice of load would be restricted by the instability criterion.
At a radial frequency ω, the impedance of a loop m with an arbitrary load ZL is,[34]
An equivalent circuit of N loaded loops is shown in Fig.
The determination of the source and load of the system, also named components grouping, are very important during the stability analysis by using Nyquist plots. From the Nyquist theory,[26] it is required that neither the source impedance or the load admittance have any pole in the RHP for the “open loop” case. Moreover, an open circuit stable (OCS) NIC which would be employed for this design has all impedance poles in the LHP,[35] thus has to be determined as a source. Clearly, a passive loop would have all the impedance poles and zeros in the LHP, therefore satisfies the specifications of being a source or a load. From 4, it is straightforward that the NIC load ZL must be stable for an open circuit state, thus should be defined as the system source. Meanwhile, the loop itself with the coupled inductance should be defined as the system load. Their impedance/admittance can be written as
As discussed before, to design an active system satisfying the conditions for robust stability, it is required that the Nyquist plots in the complex frequency domain avoid the forbidden region due to the model uncertainty. As proposed before, this region can be formulated by using the gain boundary and phase boundary. Since the loop capacitance C0 and its cascade connected resistance RC for an electrically small loop are usually very small, they can be ignored during the algebraic operations. So, the frequency response of the Nyquist plot of the m-th loop system can be obtained from Eq. (
Comparing with the nominal stability analysis of a steady-state magneto-inductive metamaterial proposed in Refs. [16] and [17], it is clear to see that the range of stable values of non-Foster inductance will decrease if we assume GM ˃ 1. Furthermore, it appears that as the magnitude of non-Foster capacitance decreases, the Nyquist curve will deviate from the uncertain region with respect to the PM specifications in the complex plane, thus the system robustness will be enhanced. It should be noted that the stability condition described by using Eqs. (
In order to validate the above analysis, we shall now apply the proposed immittance-based stability method to the practical design of active metamaterials. The equivalent system model of a practical non-Foster loaded loop in an infinite active medium is presented as shown in Fig.
Assume that the practical active metamaterial design has the following parameters: each loop is made of copper with a conductivity of 5.8 × 107 S/m. The physical dimensions for each of the loops are represented by the loop radius r0 = 10 mm and wire radius rw = 1 mm. Thus, the self-impedance of each loop Z0 can be theoretically obtained (see Ref. [34]). The active medium design is based on an infinite coaxial loop array with a 10-mm period. Assuming that the worst-model uncertainty of the RTD component is Δd = ± 10%, we may determine the gain boundary and phase boundary of the system to be GMs = 2, and PMs = 5°. The loop itself and other lumped elements each can be regarded as a time-invariant linear component, thus they can be ignored during the system error evaluation. Under the assumption of the non-Foster resistance RL = −1000 Ω, the stability bounds for the non-Foster inductance can be found to be 0 ˃ LL ˃ −21.5 nH by using Eq. (
Since we have obtained all circuit values of the system model already, it is straightforward to investigate the robust stability of the system by considering the RTD disturbance. As mentioned before, we consider two disturbed models in a worst case, respectively: model 1 with an RTD resistance of −45 Ω arriving at a normalized disturbance of +10%, and model 2 with the −10% disturbed RTD resistance of −55 Ω. The stability of the proposed medium is investigated in the complex frequency plane.
Figure
Verifying the robust stability through examination, now we could use the analytic results to predict the effective parameters of a non-Foster loaded active metamaterial. According to the theory proposed in Ref. [11], the relative permeability of the active medium with respect to the equivalent system model can be expressed as follows:
An immittance-based stability method is proposed in order to practically design the active metamaterials with non-Foster loads ensuring robust stability. By making comparison between different stability criteria, a stability method synthesizing the merits of two existing stability criterion is introduced and modified in accordance to the cascaded source-load system. With the presented equivalent system model, this stability method is applied to the practical design of active metamaterials with non-Foster loaded loop arrays. According to the specifications of the gain margin and phase margin to satisfy the requirements for robust stability, we obtain the analytic bounds for the non-Foster elements. Subsequently, the fabricated and measured RTD-based NFC are demonstrated experimentally. The measurement results show the excellence of the NFC performance. The robust stability of a practical non-Foster loaded loop is checked in the complex plane, and the effective parameters of an infinite medium or a finite structure with a fair number of unit cells are further predicted.