Investigation on Performance of Microstrip Patch Antenna for a Practical Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) Application

The performance of a microstrip patch antenna for a practical wireless local area network application is investigated in this research. This design is built around the transmission line concept. The antenna design substrate is FR4 (lossy) with a dielectric constant (Er) of 4.3 dielectric material, and the ground and patch materials are copper (annealed). The substrate is 71.62mm in width and 55.47mm in length. The height of the dielectric material is 1.6mm, which is the normal size for FR4 material. The conducting patch element has a width of 35.81mm and a length of 27.73mm for a resonance frequency of 2.573 GHz. A simulation with CST studio suite was used to optimise the antenna design. Keywords: Microstrio patch antenna, CST suite, WLAN application, Transmission line, Antenna design

Implementation of a Miniaturized Planar Tri-Band Microstrip Patch Antenna for Wireless Sensors in Mobile Applications

Antennas in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are characterized by the enhanced capacity of the network, longer range of transmission, better spatial reuse, and lower interference. In this paper, we propose a planar patch antenna for mobile communication applications operating at 1.8, 3.5, and 5.4 GHz. A planar microstrip patch antenna (MPA) consists of two F-shaped resonators that enable operations at 1.8 and 3.5 GHz while operation at 5.4 GHz is achieved when the patch is truncated from the middle. The proposed planar patch is printed on a low-cost FR-4 substrate that is 1.6 mm in thickness. The equivalent circuit model is also designed to validate the reflection coefficient of the proposed antenna with the S11 obtained from the circuit model. It contains three RLC (resistor–inductor–capacitor) circuits for generating three frequency bands for the proposed antenna. Thereby, we obtained a good agreement between simulation and measurement results. The proposed antenna has an elliptically shaped radiation pattern at 1.8 and 3.5 GHz, while the broadside directional pattern is obtained at the 5.4 GHz frequency band. At 1.8, 3.5, and 5.4 GHz, the simulated peak realized gains of 2.34, 5.2, and 1.42 dB are obtained and compared to the experimental peak realized gains of 2.22, 5.18, and 1.38 dB at same frequencies. The results indicate that the proposed planar patch antenna can be utilized for mobile applications such as digital communication systems (DCS), worldwide interoperability for microwave access (WiMAX), and wireless local area networks (WLAN).

Broadband high gain cavity resonator antenna using planar electromagnetic bandgap (EBG) superstrate

This paper presents a broadband miniaturized Fabry–Perot cavity resonator antenna (CRA) made of novel electromagnetic bandgap (EBG) superstrate as partially reflecting surface (PRS) and reactive impedance surface (RIS) backed rectangular patch antenna. To the best of the authors' knowledge, the proposed EBG exhibits the highest stopband bandwidth (BW) with a bandgap existing between 7.37 and 12.4 GHz (50.9%). Frequency-selective property of the EBG is utilized under plane wave incidence to demonstrate it as PRS superstrate in CRA antenna. The cavity is excited with a rectangular microstrip antenna which is made of two dielectric substrates with an additional RIS layer sandwiched between them. The RIS provides wideband impedance matching of the primary feed antenna. A 7 × 7 array of the EBG superstrate is loaded over the patch antenna having an overall lateral dimension of only 45 × 45 mm2 or 1.62 λ0 × 1.62 λ0 where λ0 is the free space wavelength at the center frequency of 10.8 GHz. The proposed Fabry–Perot CRA (FP-CRA) achieves gain enhancement of 6.59 dB as compared with the reference antenna and has a 10 dB return loss BW of 23.79% from 10.07 to 12.79 GHz. A prototype of the FP-CRA is fabricated and experimentally tested with single and dual layers of EBG superstrate. Measured results show BWs of 21.5 and 24.8% for the two cases with peak realized gain of 12.05 and 14.3 dBi, respectively. Later a four-element antenna array with corporate feeding is designed as the primary feed of the CRA. The simulation result shows a flat gain of >13 dBi with gain variation <1.2 dB over the impedance BW of 13.2%.

Performance Improvement of Aperture Coupled MSA through Si Micromachining

In recent times rectangular patch antenna design has become the most innovative and popular subject due to its advantages, such as being lightweight, conformal, ease to fabricate, low cost and small size. In this paper design of aperture coupled microstrip patch antenna (MSA) on high index semiconductor material coupled with micromachining technique for performance enhancement is discussed. The performance in terms of return loss bandwidth, gain, cross-polarization and antenna efficiency is compared with standard aperture coupled antenna. Micromachining underneath of the patch helps in to reduce the effective dielectric constant, which is desirable for the radiation characteristics of the patch antenna. Improvement 36 percent and 18 percent in return loss bandwidth and gain respectively achieved using micromachined aperture coupled feed patch, which is due to the reduction in losses, suppression of surface waves and substrate modes. In this article along with design, fabrication aspects on Si substrate using MEMS process also discussed. Presented antenna design is proposed antenna can be useful in smart antenna arrays suitable in satellite, radar communication applications. Two topologies at X-band are fabricated and comparison between aperture coupled and micromachined aperture coupled are presented. Index Terms—Microstrip Patch Antenna, Aperture Coupled, Micromachining, High Resistivity Silicon

Design of ultra-compact ISM band implantable patch antenna for bio-medical applications

In this paper, an ultra-compact implantable antenna for biomedical applications is proposed. The proposed implanted meandered compact patch antenna is implanted inside the body at a depth of 2 mm. The proposed antenna was designed with Roger RO3003 (ɛr = 3) as substrate with an overall size of dimensions 5 × 5 × 0.26 mm3. The radiating element is a square patch antenna with different size rectangular slots and coaxial feeding. The proposed implantable antenna resonates at 2.45 GHz (from 2.26 to 2.72 GHz) frequency with a bandwidth of 460 MHz and a gain of −22.6 dB. The specific absorption rate has been considered for health care considerations, and the result is within the limits of the federal communication commission. The measured and simulated scattering parameters are compared, and good agreements are achieved. The proposed antenna is simulated and investigated for biomedical applications suitability.

High Gain Beam Steering Antenna Arrays with Low Scan Loss for mmWave Applications

In millimeter-wave (mmWave) communications, the antenna gain is a crucial parameter to overcome path loss and atmospheric attenuation. This work presents the design of two cylindrical conformal antenna arrays, made of modified rectangular microstrip patch antenna as a radiating element, working at 28 GHz for mmWave applications providing high gain and beam steering capability. The microstrip patch antenna element uses Rogers RO4232 substrate with a thickness of 0.5 mm and surface area of 5.8 mm × 5.8 mm. The individual antenna element provides a gain of 6.9 dBi with return loss bandwidth of 5.12 GHz. The first antenna array, made by using five conformal antenna elements, achieves a uniform gain of approximately 12 dBi with minimal scan loss for extensive scan angles. In the second antenna array, a dielectric superstrate using Rogers TMM (10i) was used to modify the first antenna array. It enhanced the gain to approximately 16 dBi while still maintaining low scan loss for wide angles. The proposed array design method is very robust and can be applied to any conformal surface. The mathematical equations are also provided to derive the array design, and both array designs are verified by using full-wave simulations.

Design and Analysis of a 35 GHz Rectenna System for Wireless Power Transfer to an Unmanned Air Vehicle

In this article, the concept of a 22-kW microwave-powered unmanned aerial vehicle is presented, where the critical system architecture is analyzed and modeled for wirelessly transferring microwave power to the flying UAVs. The microwave system transmitting power at a 35 GHz frequency was found to be suitable for low-cost and compact architectures. The size of the transmitting and receiving systems are optimized to 108 m2 and 90 m2, respectively. A linearly polarized 4 × 2 rectangular microstrip patch antenna array has been designed and simulated to obtain a high gain, high directivity, and high efficiency in order to satisfy the power transfer requirement. The numerically simulated gain, directivity, and efficiency of the proposed patch antenna array are 13.4 dBi, 14 dBi, and 85%, respectively. Finally, a rectifying system (rectenna) is optimized using the Agilent advanced design system (ADS) software as a microwave power receiving system. The proposed rectenna has an efficiency profile of more than 80% for an RF input power range of 9 to 18 dBm. Moreover, the RF-to-DC conversion efficiency and DC output voltage of the proposed rectenna is 80% and 3.5 V, respectively, for a 10 dBm input power at 35 GHz with a load of 1500 Ω.