Design of Corrugated Ground Loaded with Medium for Directivity Enhancement of Circular Polarized Patch Antenna

Cheng Huang#1, Zeyu Zhao#2, Qin Feng#3, Hui Zhang#4 and Xiangang Luo#5
#

State Key Laboratory of Optical Technologies for Microfabrication, Institute of Optics and Electronics, Chinese Academy of Sciences P.O. Box 350, Chengdu 610209, China 1 bruceh1984@163.com 2 John116@126.com 3 qinfeng1973@yahoo.com.cn 4 zhangh_43@yahoo.com.cn 5 lxg@ioe.ac.cn the numerical and experimental verification for the existence of enhanced transmission and beaming effect has been obtained in the Terahertz [7-8] and microwave [9-10] domain, as EM wave transmits through subwavelength aperture with corrugated structure. In reality, the corrugated structure is well known to the antenna engineers. The choke grooves [15] are often utilized to suppress the surface wave propagation in the horn and patch antenna, and its groove depth is equal to a quarter of resonance wavelength. However, the corrugated structure proposed in this paper does not adopt the above mechanism, and reversely would excite more surface wave to resonance. The surface wave would be modulated by the grooves during its propagation on the metal surface and partially diffracted into free space, resulting in the production of the beaming effect [1-6]. Enlightened by its unique beaming property, the periodic corrugated structure has been applied in the antenna field for high directivity [16-21]. C. Huang et al. [21] put the patch antenna on the ground integrated with corrugated structure, which can significantly improve the antenna gain. However, the antenna aperture area is too large due to the groove period close to the wavelength, making the aperture efficiency rather low. So in this paper, the medium with high dielectric constant is placed between the neighboring grooves for reducing the groove period. The circular polarized patch antenna is adopted to be the exciting source, which is put above the corrugated ground with the loaded medium. Its radiation performance is investigated and simulation results show that about 7dB gain improvement can be achieved with employment of the corrugated ground plane and the aperture efficiency is also relatively increased by 13% in comparison with that of the previous corrugated patch antenna in [21]. II. ANTENNA DESIGN Figure 1 shows geometry of the circular polarized patch antenna with corrugated grooves and medium as the ground plane. The square patch with the truncated corners is utilized to generate circular polarization, which is designed to work

Abstract In this paper, a novel corrugated ground loaded with medium is proposed for enhancing the directivity of circular polarized patch antenna. Different from the suppression of surface wave propagation in the choke grooves, the proposed corrugated structure can modulate surface wave distribution and reradiate parts of surface energy into free space, resulting in the beaming effect. The radiation performance of this circular polarized patch antenna with grooves and medium loaded in the ground is investigated by using finite difference time domain method. The simulation results show that the designed antenna resonates around 10.35GHz, where the axial ratio is less than 3dB. Furthermore, the antenna gain reaches 13.2dBic, which is improved by about 7dB in comparison with circular polarized patch antenna on the flat ground. The physical mechanism for antenna performance improvement is described as well. Index Terms corrugated ground, directivity, circular polarized patch antenna, surface wave, radiation performance.

I. INTRODUCTION Recently, the novel surface grooves reported in the optical frequency attracts researcher interest. When the light incident on the subwavelength aperture surrounded with periodic grooves, the enhanced optical transmission is unexpectedly produced and a directive beam with narrow divergence is generated as well [1]. The research work focusing on the physical mechanism of the corrugated structure and its application are presented in a large number of articles. It is widely accepted that the excitation of surface plasmons (SPs) and diffraction effect play the key role in the above extraordinary phenomenon [2-10], in spite of other divergence of the mechanism existed in [11-13]. Afterwards, the concept about spoof SPs [14] had been proposed by J. B. Pendry. The surface electromagnetic (EM) wave whose dispersion relation has strong similarities with that of SPs would be provoked in the metal with subwavelength periodic grooves or hole arrays in its flat surface, though this metal is a perfect conductor. That means the existence of surface EM mode behaving like SPs can be independent of the dielectric property of the metal and supported by only making some structures on the metal surface, which opens the new vistas of SPs in the longer wavelength. As expected,

978-1-4244-2802-1/09/$25.00 2009 IEEE

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Fig.2. Reflection coefficient of the designed circular polarized patch antenna. Fig.1. Geometry of the circular polarized patch antenna with corrugated grooves and medium as the ground plane. (a) Top view; (b) Side view.

around 10.3GHz and placed in the centre of the whole antenna structure. The circular substrate with radius of R=11mm adopts Rogers5880 printed circuit board whose dielectric constant is 2.2 and thickness is 1.575mm, respectively. The square patch size is LL=8.15mm8.15mm and the two isosceles triangles with sizes of S=2.05mm are truncated on the diagonal corners. The periodic grooves are milled on the flat ground plane. Between the neighboring two grooves, we load the medium with dielectric constant of 9.8 and thickness of t=1.54mm for decreasing the groove period. Based on the analysis of groove parameters [2-5], the groove period p is close to the wavelength (29mm), whereas the employment of medium makes value of p reduced to p=20mm; The groove depth d is often approximately /4 for satisfying groove cavity resonance, and the groove width w also controls the groove cavity mode, usually further less than wavelength . In this structure, the values of d and w are optimized to be 4.8mm and 2.6mm, respectively, for the best antenna performance. It is worthwhile to point out that the groove period p that used in [21] is 20mm, where the patch antenna works at about 13GHz. Nevertheless, the value of p of the proposed grooves in this paper is not scaled up as the operation frequency is decreased to 10.3GHz and still keeps the same as the above value due to the increase of the effective wavelength between two grooves. The numerical simulation is carried out to investigate the radiation characteristics of the designed circular polarized patch antenna by using finite difference time domain method. Fig. 2 shows the simulated reflection coefficient of the antenna. It can be seen that the designed antenna can well resonate around 10.3GHz and the value of input matching is less than -10dB from 10.15GHz to 10.65GHz. The antenna gain is presented in Fig. 3, where it also includes the gain of conventional circular polarized patch antenna for the sake of comparison. We can notice that the gain of patch antenna in

Fig.3. Comparison of gain between the circular polarized patch antenna with flat ground plane and corrugated ground plane.

Fig.4. Axial Ratio of the designed circular polarized patch antenna.

the flat ground plane is about 6.3dBic, while the employment of grooves and medium in the ground plane can largely improve the antenna gain by 7dB around the resonance frequency. In [21], the ground plane composed of periodic grooves with number of two also makes the antenna gain enhanced to 13.4dBic. Though the physical aperture area of these two antennas is nearly the same, the effective

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Fig.5. Radiation pattern of the designed circular polarized patch antenna at 10.35GHz.

aperture area of this circular polarized patch is obviously reduced due to the decrease of the operation frequency. The effective aperture area of the antenna can be calculated by the following equation: (1) Where D denotes the antenna directivity and 0 represents the resonance wavelength. Therefore, the aperture efficiency is defined in terms of the physical aperture area A and effective aperture Aeff. A K = eff A (2) According to the equation (1) and (2), the aperture efficiency of the patch antenna designed in this paper is calculated to be 35%, which is significantly improved by 13% compared with that of the patch antenna in [21]. Fig. 4 shows the axial ratio of the proposed antenna. It can be observed that the axial ratio band in which the value of axial ratio is less than 3dB is 10.25-10.45GHz. In this case, the patch antenna can generate a circular polarization owing to the symmetry of the loaded grooves structure. From the above three figures, we also can figure out that the overlapped operation band of this circular polarized patch antenna where S11<-10dB, the variation of gain is less than 1dB below the maximum gain and axial ratio <3dB is about 200MHz. The radiation pattern of this circular polarized patch antenna at frequency corresponding to the maximum gain is depicted in the Fig. 5, including the principle plane (=0 deg) of left and right hand circular polarization. It can be found that this antenna can support the left hand circular polarization and achieve high directivity with the narrow beamwidth. Furthermore, the side lobe level less than -20dB relative to the main lobe can be obtained and the backward radiation is also small. To our knowledge, the conventional method to realize high gain is to adopt array antenna, where the complicated feed network is needed and introduction of the insert loss of power dividers is inevitable as well. There is some other technique, such as frequency selective surface

Fig. 6. Instantaneous electric field distribution at the surface of the designed circular polarized patch antenna at 10.35GHz.

A eff

O0 D 4S

superstrate[22], to enhance directivity, whereas it would sacrifice antennas profile. Therefore, the above simulation results have shown the superiority of our designed circular polarized patch antenna due to its light weight, low profile and planar structure. III. DISCUSSION Figure 6 shows the instantaneous electric field distribution at the surface of the designed circular polarized patch antenna at 10.35GHz. Note that, the surface electric field revolves clockwise within one period, also indicating that this antenna radiates the left hand circular polarized EM wave. It is worthwhile to emphasize that the redistribution of surface energy occurs under modulation of the loaded grooves structure. The relatively high electric field strength exists in the groove region during the each state, as shown in the Fig. 6. Additionally, when the surface wave propagates along the ground plane and encounters the surface defect (grooves), it would be partially scattered into free space, as the secondary source. Therefore, the constructive superposition of the energy radiated by the patch antenna (primary radiation source) and that diffracted by the surface grooves (secondary radiation source) takes place in the far field, determining the appearance of beaming effect. VI. CONCLUSION The directive circular polarized patch antenna is presented in this paper. The ground plane of this antenna is composed of surface grooves and the loaded medium with high dielectric constant. The effectiveness of the corrugated structure on the improvement of antenna performance has been verified by the numerical simulation. The 7dB gain enhancement can be obtained at the resonance frequency, compared with the conventional circular polarized patch

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antenna. The surface energy is partially reradiated into free space and takes constructive interference with the energy emitted from the central patch, which is responsible of the directive beam. This planar corrugated structure proposed in this paper has shown its predominance in improving directivity of the circular polarized patch antenna, which is expected to have potential application in the antenna field. ACKNOWLEDGEMENT This work was supported by National Basic Research Program of China (No.2006CB302900), National Natural Science Funds for Distinguished Young Scholar (No.60825405). One of the authors (C. Huang) also acknowledges partial support from scientific innovation funding for graduates of Chinese Academy of Sciences. REFERENCES
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