A Foldable Tightly Coupled Crossed Rings Antenna Array of Ultrawide Bandwidth and Dual Polarization

Abstract

Low-profile foldable array antennas are becoming increasingly more important for a wide range of applications such as satellite communications and wearable electronic devices. The conventional arrays formed by patch-like antennas have been extensively studied on surfaces with a curvature but they have exhibited limited bandwidth and polarization performance. This study investigates a coupling enhanced crossed rings antenna array with two typical configurations for dual polarization, which inherently produces ultrawide bandwidth, dipole-like polarization characteristics and a fully curved array (FCA) eventually. The fractional bandwidth of the array is over 100% on a planar surface and expanded to approximately 140% on the curved surface. For the bent array of slant polarization, the beamwidth increases by over 20° compared to the planar array and cross polarization discrimination (XPD) maintains above 15 dB. The effects of curvature on the impedance matching and polarized radiation patterns for such arrays are investigated by measuring the performance of the fabricated prototype arrays. The results revealed that the tightly coupled crossed rings antenna array on a curved surface has a potential to form multiple beams on a limited aperture size through smaller subarrays which can yield ultrawide bandwidth due to concentrated mutual coupling mechanism. This characteristic is promising in applications where traditional flat panel arrays are difficult to implement such as in mobile stations, moving platforms and for satellite communication on-the-move.