Bandwidth Widening, Gain Improvement and Efficiency Boost of an Antenna Using Artificial Magnetic Conductor (AMC) Ground Plane

Abstract

In this paper, a standalone patch antenna operating at 2.3 GHz is initially designed as a reference antenna. Subsequently, the patch antenna is incorporated with an Artificial Magnetic Conductor (AMC) as the ground plane to obtain an Antenna with Artificial Magnetic Conductor (AAMC). Performance comparison is analyzed between the standalone patch antenna and the AAMC. The incorporation of AMC to the patch antenna successfully enhances the bandwidth of the standalone patch antenna by 520%, increases gain by 2dBi, and boosts the efficiency up to 30 % as compared to the reference antenna. As a result of the bandwidth enhancement, the AAMC is capable to cover several frequency bands within 2.19 GHz to 2.5 GHz. Hence, the new design is suitable for WiMAX, WLAN and RFID applications. The measurement results in terms of return loss, gain and radiation patterns agreed satisfactorily with the simulated ones. Moreover, the parametric studies of antenna dimensions and air gap are presented and discussed.

Artificial magnetic conductor for various antenna applications: An overview

“…A microstrip antenna is preferable and inherently advantageous due to its light weight, easy fabrication, low cost, and conformability to various types of surfaces . The disadvantages of using microstrip antennas are that they generally low gain and are narrow in bandwidth (commonly 5%) …”