Investigation of miniaturized microstrip antenna efficiency enhancement

Radiation Efficiency improvement of miniaturized microstrip antenna is studied in this thesis. It is shown that, the loss reduction in miniaturized Microstrip Antenna can be achieved through two possible ways. The first is by modifying the materials used for building the antenna, and the second meth...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Raju, Robin
Other Authors: Shafai, L (Electrical and Computer Engineering)
Published: 2015
Subjects:
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/1993/30652
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Summary:Radiation Efficiency improvement of miniaturized microstrip antenna is studied in this thesis. It is shown that, the loss reduction in miniaturized Microstrip Antenna can be achieved through two possible ways. The first is by modifying the materials used for building the antenna, and the second method is by increasing the radiation conductance of the antenna. Material modification at nano/micro scale by replacing conductors with Metallo-Dielectric one dimensional medium for applications in loss reduction is investigated first. It is shown by the Transfer Matrix Method and using simulations that, for a one dimensional medium replacing very thin conductors (less than skin depth) by laminated multilayered conductors reduce losses. However, the improvement does not exceed the case of single conductor which is a few times thicker than skin depth. Secondly, the efficiency improvement of a small H-Shaped patch antenna by using closely coupled stacked parasitic resonators is studied. It is shown that significant improvement in efficiency can be achieved with minimal changes in the foot print, radiation pattern and cross polarization levels of the antenna. The effect of the overall thickness and superstrate dielectric constant on the efficiency improvement is studied parametrically. It is shown that by using 5 radiating resonators and appropriate choice of inter-conductor dielectric constant, for a small increase in thickness of 0.127mm (5mil), the radiation efficiency can be increased from 2.34% to 6.3%. This efficiency improvement can be made very significant from 2.4% to 33%, by increasing the height to 1.27mm (50mil). These translate to a gain improvement of 4dB and 13dB, respectively. This technique is also demonstrated experimentally in H-Shaped antennas with two different levels of miniaturizations. === October 2015