Bandwidth reconfigurable antenna on a liquid crystal polymer substrate for automotive communication applications

摘要

A compact and ultrathin frequency reconfigurable antenna is presented in this article (40 x 30 x 0.1 mm(3)) for vehicular communication applications. The proposed antenna design contains a coplanar waveguide fed circular ring structure along with the angularly placed parasitic circular elements fabricated on a Rogers ULTRALAM-3850 liquid crystal polymer (LCP) substrate of epsilon r = 2.9. The operating bandwidth around the targeted resonant modes 2.4 GHz, 5.9 GHz, 9.5 GHz and 12.5 GHz of the antenna are reconfigured by controlling the BAR64-03W PIN diode switching elements in the antenna design. Further, this work focused on analyzing the radome substrate permittivity effects and radome housing effects on the performance of the proposed reconfigurable antenna at different switching states and then far-field characteristics of the radome enclosed antenna after placing the antenna on rooftop of the vehicle are also presented. A step further, the radome paint effects on the propagation of the signal in a real-time environment are experimentally studied by measuring the received signal strength parameter and presented in the article. The gain of the proposed antenna swings between -0.51 dB to 6.12 dB for the antenna in stand-alone mode whereas it varies from 2.85 dB to 8.54 dB for the antenna installed with radome. (C) 2020 Elsevier GmbH. All rights reserved.