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Liquid Metal Bandwidth-Reconfigurable Antenna

2019; IEEE Antennas & Propagation Society; Volume: 19; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1109/lawp.2019.2959879

1548-5757

Khaled Yahya Alqurashi, James R. Kelly, Zhengpeng Wang, Carol Crean, R. Mittra, Mohsen Khalily, Yue Gao,

Advanced Antenna and Metasurface Technologies

This letter shows how slugs of liquid metal can be used to connect/disconnect large areas of metalization and achieve a radiation performance not possible by using conventional switches. The proposed antenna can switch its operating bandwidth between ultrawideband and narrowband by connecting/disconnecting the ground plane for the feedline from that of the radiator. This could be achieved by using conventional semiconductor switches. However, such switches provide point-like contacts. Consequently, there are gaps in electrical contact between the switches. Surface currents, flowing around these gaps, lead to significant back radiation. In this letter, the slugs of a liquid metal are used to completely fill the gaps. This significantly reduces the back radiation, increases the bore-sight gain, and produces a pattern identical to that of a conventional microstrip patch antenna. Specifically, the realized gain and total efficiency are increased by 2 dBi and 24%, respectively. The antenna has potential applications in wireless systems employing cognitive radio (CR) and spectrum aggregation.