Circularly polarized microstrip antenna arrays with reduced mutual coupling using metamaterial

Abstract

A circularly polarized (CP) and high gain Microstrip antenna is designed in this paper using metamaterial concepts. The antenna, built on a metamaterial substrate, showed significant size reduction and less mutual coupling in an array compared with similar arrays on conventional substrates. Demonstrated to have left-handed magnetic characteristics, the methodology uses complementary split-ring resonators (SRRs) placed horizontally between the patch and the ground plane. In order to reduce mutual coupling in the array structure, hexagonal-SRRs are embedded between antenna elements. The procedure is shown to have great impact on the antenna performance specifically its bandwidth which is broadened from 400 MHz to 1.2 GHz for X-band and as well as its efficiency. The structure has also low loss and improved standing wave ratio and less mutual coupling. The results show that a reduction of 26.6 dB in mutual coupling is obtained between elements at the operation frequency of the array. Experimental data show a reasonably good agreement between simulation and measured results.