Doctor of Philosophy

dissertationAntenna design and reduction of losses in antenna systems are critical for modern communications systems. Two categories of antennas suffer from limited power supply and difficult operating environments: implantable antennas and antennas for spacecraft applications. Minimizing and controlling losses in these two antenna types is critical for developing next-generation implantable devices, spacecraft, and satellites. Research suggests that future tattoo antennas will be made from low-conductivity ink utilizing the natural insulating property of the body's fat and lossy ground plane of muscle. This paper supports tattoo antenna work by: (1) demonstrating the insulating properties of fat and conductivity of muscle with various antenna systems, (2) showing the effect of biological materials on the current distribution of subdermal antennas, and (3) validating the use of lower-conductivity materials in subdermal antenna design including a novel gold nanoparticle material. Simulations and measurements are used to evaluate current distributions shared between solid, segmented, and meshed strip dipole antennas and surrounding body tissues. Fat insulates the antenna similar to a thin layer of plastic wrap. Muscle acts as a conductive ground plane. Dipole antennas with mesh or gap structures are more strongly coupled to body tissues than solid antennas. A minimum acceptable conductivity benchmark of 105 S/m is established for dipole antennas and Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID) antennas. This work also provides novel information on the design of low-cost, circularly polarized (CP), Ka-band (26 GHz), millimeter-wave, 50 Ω edge-fed, corners truncated patch antennas on RT/duroid 5880 (εr = 2.2, ½ oz. copper cladding). Microstrip feed width, axial ratio (AR) bandwidth, and best AR at 26 GHz are optimized by the use of 10 mil substrate. The effects of corner truncation are further investigated, showing that increasing corner truncation increases AR bandwidth, increases percent offset between best S11 and AR frequencies, and worsens the best AR. A truncation of 0.57 mm is a good compromise between these effects with AR bandwidth of 6.17 % (measured) and 1.37 % (simulated). Increasing ratio of substrate thickness to design frequency, t / λd, improves AR bandwidth. For t / λd below a certain threshold a corners truncated patch antenna will not produce CP. A new nearly-square, corners truncated patch antenna is measured and simulated as a method of increasing circular polarization bandwidth (CPBW)

Dual-band circularly-polarized shared-aperture array for C/X-Band satellite communications

A novel method of achieving a single-feed circularly-polarized (CP) microstrip antenna with both broad impedance bandwidth and axial ratio (AR) bandwidth is presented. The CP characteristics are generated by employing a resonator to excite the two orthogonal modes of the patch via two coupling paths and the required 90 o phase difference is achieved by using the different orders of the two paths. The presented method, instead of conventional methods that power dividers and phase delay lines are usually required, not only significantly enhances the bandwidths of the antenna, but also results in a compact feed, reduced loss and high gain. Based on this method, a dual-band shared-aperture CP array antenna is implemented for C/X-band satellite communications. The antenna aperture includes a 2 × 2 array at C-band and a 4 ×4 array at X-band. To accommodate the C/X-band elements into the same aperture while achieving a good isolation between them, the C-band circular patches are etched at the four corners. The measured results agree well with the simulations, showing a wide impedance bandwidth of 21% and 21.2% at C-and X-band, respectively. The C-and X-band 3-dB AR bandwidths are 13.2% and 12.8%. The array also exhibits a high aperture efficiency of over 55%, low side-lobe (C-band: −12.5 dB; X-band: −15 dB) and high gain (C-band: 14.5 dBic; X-band: 17.5 dBic)

Optimization of the close coupling effect for passive UHF RFID tags in stacked applications

The use of the radio frequency identification has become more popular in recent years, since it has many advantages (such as operation without human involvement or detection non-line-of sight at several meters) than the other identification system. The RFID tags are utilized in many different applications. In a wide range of applications (e.g. in the retail business), the RFID tags are often stacked together. The stacked UHF RFID tags are known to have less read range compare to the stand-alone tags. In the other words, placing the tag in the close proximity of other tags, affects the performance of the tag, due to electromagnetic interference between the antennas of the tags. The most of the analysis about effect of the close coupling have been done for the UHF RFID tags in near-field application. Since many different factors are involved in the performance of the tag in far-field applications, it is more complicated to analyze the interaction between the tags when they are placed in the close proximity of each other inside the far-field region of the reader antenna. In this project, the effect of some design parameters on the close coupling has been studied and one practical approach for improvement of the performance of the tags in the stacked application has been introduced. The performance of a reference tag in stack is measured. Then the new versions of the reference tag are designed by adjusting some of the reference tag antenna’s parameters. The measurement of the new version designs in stack shows the performance enhancement for one of the new design. The comparison between the results of the different designs verifies that the design parameters can have influence to the minimizing of the close coupling effect

Dual Polarized Patch Antenna for UHF RFID Readers

RFID is a fast emerging automatic identification system. Its bigger data density, better security, high speed and the fact that it does not need mechanical contact or line of sight communication have made it preferable to many other identification systems such as bar code, optical character recognition, biometric identification and smart cards. Nevertheless, this fast growing technology faces some difficulties in keeping tags simple and low cost while keeping efficient and reliable communication. This thesis is among the solutions that are proposed to fulfill this goal. So far, readers usually have either linearly or circularly polarized antennas and most tags are linearly polarized. Linearly polarized reader antennas are highly sensitive to the orientation of tags. In addition, circularly polarized reader antennas have fields that rotate across a plane and thus have only 50% polarization matching with tags. Accordingly, a dual linearly polarized patch antenna is proposed, implemented and tested as a solution to reduce the power loss caused by an arbitrary orientation of RFID tags. Among the RFID technologies, passive UHF RFID, which has a bigger read range and simpler tags, working in UHF frequency, is given emphasis in this project. Thus, background information about reader antennas and dual polarized antennas has been made. In addition, a reader antenna based on a patch antenna operating in European UHF RFID band of 865 MHz-868 MHz is considered. The modeling softwares CST Microwave Studio and Empire XCcell were used in simulation. Then, the laboratory facility in Electronics department of Tampere University of Technology was used to implement and test the prototype. /Kir1

Dual-Band RFID Antenna for 0.92 GHz Near-Field and 2.45 GHz Far-Field Applications

A novel antenna used in the near field of a 0.92 GHz and the far field of a 2.45 GHz RFID reader system is investigated. The new antenna achieves strong magnetic field distribution over 0.92 GHz with good performance of detecting tags when applied in FCC RFID systems, as well as a good performance of circular polarization at 2.45 GHz. Furthermore, the investigation shows the operation principle by circuit models and the advantages of the structure in terms of the operation frequency and field performances. The advantages of these two bands could be achieved by this novel RFID reader antenna

Wideband and UWB antennas for wireless applications. A comprehensive review

A comprehensive review concerning the geometry, the manufacturing technologies, the materials, and the numerical techniques, adopted for the analysis and design of wideband and ultrawideband (UWB) antennas for wireless applications, is presented. Planar, printed, dielectric, and wearable antennas, achievable on laminate (rigid and flexible), and textile dielectric substrates are taken into account. The performances of small, low-profile, and dielectric resonator antennas are illustrated paying particular attention to the application areas concerning portable devices (mobile phones, tablets, glasses, laptops, wearable computers, etc.) and radio base stations. This information provides a guidance to the selection of the different antenna geometries in terms of bandwidth, gain, field polarization, time-domain response, dimensions, and materials useful for their realization and integration in modern communication systems

Design and development of novel radio frequency identification (RFID) tag structures

The objective of the proposed research is to design and develop a series of radio frequency identification (RFID) tag structures that exhibit good performance characteristics with cost optimization and can be realized on flexible substrates such as liquid crystal polymer (LCP), paper-based substrate and magnetic composite material for conformal applications. The demand for flexible RFID tags has recently increased tremendously due to the requirements of automatic identification in various areas. Several major challenges existing in today's RFID technologies need to be addressed before RFID can eventually march into everyone's daily life, such as how to design high performance tag antennas with effective impedance matching for passive RFID IC chips to optimize the power performance, how to fabricate ultra-low-cost RFID tags in order to facilitate mass production, how to integrate sensors with passive RFID tags for pervasive sensing applications, and how to realize battery-free active RFID tags in which changing battery is not longer needed. In this research, different RFID tag designs are realized on flexible substrates. The design techniques presented set the framework for answering these technical challenges for which, the focus will be on RFID tag structure design, characterization and optimization from the perspectives of both costs involved and technical constraints.Ph.D.Committee Chair: Tentzeris, Manos; Committee Member: DeJean, Gerald; Committee Member: Ingram, Mary; Committee Member: Kavadias, Stylianos; Committee Member: Laskar, Jo