- A Study on the Radiation Characteristics of Microstrip Array Antennas on the Nonplanar Surface
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- The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences, volume 14, issue 2, 1989, Pages 121~136
Abstract
In this paper, an attempt has been made to analyze the theoretically and verify experimentally the effect of curvature on the radiation characteristics of microstrip array antennas mounted conformally on the concave surface and the convex surface of the cylindrical body. The analysis of single element microstrip antenna is made by using the analysis method of Transmission Line Model. The theory of array antennas is established by application of the method of transformed coordinates, in which the translation and the ratation about each single element arrayed two-demensionally on the nonplanar surface are under consideration, and it is investigated by computation of the synthetic electric field strength in the far zone. In addition, various radiation characteristics, such as return loss, resonant frequency, radiation pattern, half-power, beamwidth, gain, are measrued and compared with the theroetical values according to the variation of curvature, by designing and building 4-element array microstrip antenna operating at 10 GHz, and microstrip feed lines. As predicted in theroy, it is verified that radiation pattern of antennas mounted on the concave and the convex surfaces alike broadens as the radius of curvature decreases. And for the curved surfaces, aggrement between computed values of the total synthetic radiation power pattern by the method of transformed coordinates and measured valuse is good. Besides, it is found that resonant frequency, input impedance and gain are hardly affected by the radius of curvature.