Design and optimization of dielectric resonator antenna array for c-band satellite applications

Abstract

The increasing use of wireless and satellite communication systems demand the antennas for different systems and standards with properties like reduced size, broadband, multiband operation, moderate gain etc. The planar and dielectric resonator antennas are the present day antenna designer’s choice. However, conducting microstrip patch antennas inherently have a narrow bandwidth. In this thesis, a low-cost compact Dielectric Resonator Antenna array resulting Wideband characteristics with a band dispensation is presented. The antenna is implemented on FR4 substrate with a thickness of 1.6 mm and relative permittivity (år) of 4.4. It has a partial ground plane. The antenna array is fed by the rectangular conformal patch attached to microstrip line. The reflection coefficient (S11) is less than -10 dB in 5.4 GHz−7.4 GHz frequency range with possible satellite applications. The array factor consideration for Rectangular Dielectric Resonator Antenna is also been analysed in this thesis. The proposed antenna array is then optimized using genetic optimization technique to reduce the side lobe level and at the same time to increase the directive gain of the antenna. The performance characteristics of the proposed antenna are simulated using CST microwave studio 2011TM software. The performance characteristics that have been analysed using CST microwave studio 2011TM software are Return loss (S11), Voltage Standing Wave Ratio (VSWR) and Farfield radiation pattern plot. The ‘Roger’ dielectric material is used for resonator having dielectric constant (år=10.1). The dielectric material ‘Teflon’ can also be introduces in place of roger as rogger is not easily available. The thesis contains MATLAB generated plots showing the optimization using the concept of genetic algorithm.