Performance Analysis of Microstrip Circular Patch Antenna Composed of Artificial Dielectric Material

Performance of microstrip circular patch antenna is determinable from the dielectric substrate used between the patch and the groundplane. An FR4 epoxy dielectric substrate is one of the materials which is frequently used to implement the microstrip patch antenna. This paper presents a performance analysis of microstrip circular patch antenna composed of artificial dielectric material (ADM). Here, the ADM is made of an FR4 epoxy dielectric substrate as the host material which is modified by incorporating a number of thin conductor wires into inside of the dielectric substrate. Meanwhile, a conventional microstrip circular patch antenna is also designed as comparison by using the same dielectric substrate without any modification. The characterization results show that the resonant frequency of microstrip circular patch antennas made of ADM with 82 and 110 thin conductor wires are 16.19% and 23.17% lower than of the conventional microstrip circular patch antenna, respectively. Whilst the -10dB working bandwidths of microstrip circular patch antenna made of ADM with 82 and 110 thin conductor wires are around 72.9MHz narrower around 43.4% than of the conventional microstrip circular patch antenna. In addition, the gains of microstrip circular patch antenna made of ADM with 82 and 110 thin conductor wires are 5.54dBi and 6.1dBi, respectively, where these are relatively higher than of the conventional microstrip circular patch antenna which has the gain of 5.24dBi.