Generation of OAM Waves and Analysis of Mode Purity for 5G Sub-6 GHz Applications

This article presents the generation of Orbital Angular Momentum (OAM) vortex waves with mode 1 using Uniform Circular Array (UCA) antenna. Two different designs, namely, UCA-1 (4-element array antenna) and UCA-2 (8-element array antenna), were designed and fabricated using FR-4 substrate to generate OAM mode 1 at 3.5 GHz (5G mid-band). The proposed antenna arrays comprised rectangular microstrip patch elements with inset fed technique. The elements were excited by a carefully designed feeding phase shift network to provide similar output energy at output ports with desired phase shift value. The generated OAM waves were confirmed by measuring the null in the bore sight of their 2D radiation patterns, simulated phase distribution and intensity distribution. The measurement results agree well with the simulation results. Moreover, a detailed mode purity analysis of the generated OAM waves was carried out considering different factors. The investigation found that the greater the number of elements, the higher the purity of the generated OAM wave. Compared with other previous works, the proposed antenna design of this paper is very simple to design and fabricate. In addition, the proposed antennas are compact in design even at lower frequency band with very wide bandwidth to meet the requirements of 5G mid-band applications.