An Efficient Approach to the Analysis and Synthesis of Spherical-Circular ThinMicrostrip Antennas

摘要

Microstrip antennas are nowadays an important topic of antenna theory and techniques, hence of modem antenna education. For a course to be most effective, students should be able to simulate such structures. A drawback, however, is that inexpensive CAD programs adopted in the classroom, such as PCAAD [1] and AMCLR [2], do not cover the analysis of conformed antennas, which by the way is also true of commercial software, such as IE3D [3] and Ansoft Designer [4]. Only expensive CAD tools, such as HFSS [5] and CST [6], provide for this kind of modeling, but, acquisition costs aside, they also require powerful computers, which might not be available for educational purposes. On the other hand, Mathematica, an integrated technical computing software with a' vast collection of built-in functions, has become a 'well-established applied mathematical tool in the education of engineers and physicists [7]. In particular, it has been successfully used in antenna courses as an important auxiliary tool for analyzing and designing planar microstrip and printed radiators [8]-[9]. Its powerful algorithms for calculating cylindrical and spherical harmonics functions make Mathematical' suitable for the analysis of conformed antennas. This paper reports a Mathematica -based CAD software capable of performing the analysis and synthesis of spherical-circular thin microstrip antennas with high computational efficiency.