volume | PIER Journals

Abstract

A novel array-antenna decoupling surface (ADS) for mutual coupling reduction in microstrip patch antenna is proposed in this paper. The proposed ADS is composed of a group of primary reflector patches and a pair of rectangular and T-shaped secondary reflector patches. Through generating the reflected waves with equal magnitude but out of phase of the coupling waves, the isolation of the antenna elements could be significantly improved by the novel proposed ADS. Then, for verification, a two-element microstrip antenna array covered by the proposed ADS with an edge-to-edge separation of 0.11λ₀ (λ₀ is the wavelength of the operating frequency in free space) was designed and fabricated. As expected, the experimental results have demonstrated that an additional 40.4 dB isolation enhancement at the resonant frequency was achieved by the proposed ADS. Moreover, a much wider bandwidth of the isolation was also obtained than that of return loss of 10 dB. In addition, a gain improvement of 0.95 dB was achieved at 2.45 GHz by utilizing the novel ADS. Thus, the decoupling structure can be applied to multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems for its simple structure and high isolation providing.

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Dr. Zicheng Niu

Dr. Hou Zhang

Dr. Qiang Chen

Dr. Tao Zhong