Electromagnetic radiation by antennas of arbitrary shape in a layered spherical media

A unified method of moments model is developed for the analysis of arbitrarily shaped antennas that are radiating next to a multilayered dielectric sphere. The curvilinear Rao-Wilton-Glisson triangular basis functions and dyadic Green's functions have been used in the model. Antennas of various geometries including spherical, circular and rectangular microstrip antennas as well as hemispherical dielectric resonators have been modeled. Input impedance and radiation pattern results are presented and shown to be in good agreement with published data

Simulation of patch antennas on arbitrary dielectric substrates.

Based on the combined surface and volume RWG (Rao-Wilton-Glisson) basis functions, a simulator of a patch antenna on a finite dielectric substrate using the Method of Moments (MoM) has been implemented in Matlab. The metal surface is divided into planar triangular elements whereas the (inhomogeneous) dielectric volume is divided into tetrahedral elements. The structure under study is comprised of a typical patch antenna consisting of a single patch above a finite ground plane, and a probe feed. The performance of the solver is studied for different mesh configurations. The results obtained are tested by comparison with the commercial ANSOFT HFSS v8.5 and WIPL-D simulators. The former uses a large number of finite elements (up to 30,000) and adaptive mesh refinement, thus providing the reliable data for comparison. Behavior of the most sensitive characteristic ¡V antenna input impedance ¡V is tested, close to the first resonant frequency. The error in the resonant frequency is estimated at different values of the relative dielectric constant ƒÕr, which ranges from 1 to 20. The reported results show reasonable agreement. However, the solver needs to be further improved

Development and Validation of a Method of Moments approach for modeling planar antenna structures

In this dissertation, a Method of Moments (MoM) Volume Integral Equation (VIE)-based modeling approach suitable for a patch or slot antenna on a thin finite dielectric substrate is developed and validated. Two new key features of this method are the use of proper dielectric basis functions and proper VIE conditioning, close to the metal surface, where the surface boundary condition of the zero tangential-component must be extended into adjacent tetrahedra. The extended boundary condition is the exact result for the piecewise-constant dielectric basis functions. The latter operation allows one to achieve a good accuracy with one layer of tetrahedra for a thin dielectric substrate and thereby greatly reduces computational cost. The use of low-order basis functions also implies the use of low-order integration schemes and faster filling of the impedance matrix. For some common patch/slot antennas, the VIE-based modeling approach is found to give an error of about 1% or less in the resonant frequency for one-layer tetrahedral meshes with a relatively small number of unknowns. This error is obtained by comparison with fine finite- element method (FEM) simulations, or with measurements, or with the analytical mode matching approach. Hence it is competitive with both the method of moments surface integral equation approach and with the FEM approach for the printed antennas on thin dielectric substrates. Along with the MoM development, the dissertation also presents the models and design procedures for a number of practical antenna configurations. They in particular include: i. a compact linearly polarized broadband planar inverted-F antenna (PIFA); ii. a circularly polarized turnstile bowtie antenna. Both the antennas are designed to operate in the low UHF band and used for indoor positioning/indoor geolocation

MoM modeling of metal-dielectric structures using volume integral equations

Modeling of patch antennas and resonators on arbitrary dielectric substrates using surface RWG and volume edge based basis functions and the Method of Moments is implemented. The performance of the solver is studied for different mesh configurations. The results obtained are tested by comparison with experiments and Ansoft HFSS v9 simulator. The latter uses a large number of finite elements (up to 200K) and adaptive mesh refinement, thus providing the reliable data for comparison. The error in the resonant frequency is estimated for canonical resonator structures at different values of the relative dielectric constant ƒÕr, which ranges from 1 to 200. The reported results show a near perfect agreement in the estimation of resonant frequency for all the metal-dielectric resonators. Behavior of the antenna input impedance is tested, close to the first resonant frequency for the patch antenna. The error in the resonant frequency is estimated for different structures at different values of the relative dielectric constant ƒÕr, which ranges from 1 to 10. A larger error is observed in the calculation of the resonant frequency of the patch antenna. Moreover, this error increases with increase in the dielectric constant of the substrate. Further scope for improvement lies in the investigation of this effect

Discontinuous Galerkin vs. IE Method for Electromagnetic Scattering from Composite Metallic and Dielectric Structures

In this paper, an efficient volume surface integral equation (VSIE) method with nonconformal discretization is developed for the analysis of electromagnetic scattering from composite metallic and dielectric (CMD) structures. This VSIE scheme utilizes curved tetrahedral (triangular) elements for volume (surface) modeling and the associated CRWG (CSWG) basis functions for volume current (surface) current modeling. Further, a discontinuous Galerkin (DG) volume integral equation (VIE) method and a DG surface integral equation (SIE) approach are adopted for dielectric and metallic parts, respectively, which allow both conformal and nonconformal volume/surface discretization improving meshing flexibility considerably. Numerical results are provided to demonstrate the accuracy, efficiency, and flexibility of our scheme