Projects:2021s1-13113 Miniaturised metasurface antennas

Abstract here

Introduction

In this modern age, there is an ever growing demand for wireless communication, resulting to an increasing use of antennas. In portable devices, integrated antennas are becoming more common, as their compact size and nature proves ideal to have a compact and elegant solution, removing the need for traditional, external antennas. There is also an evergrowing number of wireless connection protocols, requiring unique antennas to support each protocol. A typical phone will include at minimum, 3G, Wifi, Bluetooth and GPS antennas.
With many designs in technology, there is a reoccuring theme of attempting to shrink designs, whilst maintaining or improving upon performance. Antennas are not neglected from this, with a particular interest in integrated antennas. Antenna design has physical limitations, as the size of the antenna is dependent on the operating frequency. For lower frequency operations, this proves problematic, as there are greater wavelengths, resulting in larger antennas. This is where a technique known as 'metasurfacing' can be used to miniaturise lower frequency integrated antennas, whilst complying with the physical limitations. This technique involves the periodic arrangement of small elements above the dielectric material, which affects the reflection and transmission of electromagnetic waves. The use of this metasurfacing technique will be explored, and attempted to be utilised to miniaturise a patch antenna, whilst maintaining or improving antenna performance such as bandwidth, and directive gain.

Project team

Project students

• Galvin Chuong
• Isaac Do

Supervisors

• Dr Christophe Fumeaux
• Dr Shengjian Chen (Jammy)
• David de Haaij (Black Arts Technology)

Objectives

The objective of this project focuses on two final desigs of the miniaturised metasurface antenna with the operating frequency at 900 MHz. These designs must match or improve the performance of the antenna before miniaturisation. The antennas must satisfy the bandwidth of 900 MHz – 928 MHz. These final designs will include many milestones, mainly revolving around many design processes until the final design is reached. These include a benchmark antenna, recreation of past literature antennas, first design of a metasurface antenna and then the final design before fabrication. The designs are created and simulated using CST Studio Suite, a 3D Electromagnetic simulation and analysis software.

References

[1] a, b, c, "Simple page", In Proceedings of the Conference of Simpleness, 2010.

[2] ...