Effect of substrate on the radiation efficiency of different microstrip phased array antennas

摘要

In the present work, we perform an analysis to study the surface wave (SW) losses of three different microstrip phased array antennas immersed in ionized (plasma) medium. The calculations have also been made for the radiation efficiency of two element array presented by Saxena et al (1989). The SW losses are calculated using the data on the substrate permittivity, its thickness and free space wavelength. It is found that the surface wave losses together with plasma wave (electroacoustic) losses affect the radiation efficiency of microstrip array antennas adversely. The inclusion of SW losses changes the radiation efficiency more significantly for the plasma frequencies ω_p < 0.5 ω_0(ω_0 is the source frequency).