volume | PIER Journals

Abstract

In this paper, a novel approach was used to design two-layer stacked high gain microstrip antenna array with improved bandwidth and high aperture efficiency. Cross Snowflake fractal microstrip patches were employed as radiation elements. Varieties of antenna arrays with different fractal iterations were optimized by using the Genetic Algorithm (GA) associated with 3D full-wave Finite Element Method (FEM) in order to investigate the influence of the Cross Snowflake fractal radiators. As compared with the conventional square patches, the Cross Snowflake fractal configuration provides extremely high flexibility to achieve a wideband performance and maintains higher aperture efficiency at operating frequency band. A prototype antenna with 2 x 2 Cross Snowflake radiators was fabricated and measured. Both simulated and measured results show that the proposed antenna has some promising performances to be more specially, the measured impedance bandwidth is 22.9% (from 5.18 GHz to 6.52 GHz) when S₁₁<10 dB; the simulated gain is 12.0 dBi and its corresponding aperture efficiency is up to 87.4% at the working frequency 5.8 GHz.

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Dr. Wei Jin

Professor Xiaoqing Yang

Dr. Xueyao Ren

Professor Kama Huang