Design and performance analysis of high gain microstrip patch antennas employing leather substrates for earth exploration satellite applications

Abstract

The study of various types of microstrip patch antenna designs employing different leather substrates having different dielectric constants on the realization of microstrip antenna has been carried out in this paper. The types of leathers employed as substrate in the proffered antenna designs are the brown leather with er=1.54, white leather having er=1.67 and black leather with er=1.62. The thick-ness of brown leather, black leather and white leather is 1.8 mm, 2.8 mm and 2.25 mm, respectively. The propounded antenna employing brown leather as substrate has the return loss of −54.49 dB with the corresponding resonant frequency of 8.20 GHz operating in the frequency range of 7.98 GHz-8.45 GHz. The propounded antenna using substrate as brown leather has high gain of 8.33 dB and directivity of 8.24 dBi and percentage bandwidth of 5.73 percent. The propounded antenna employing white leather as a substrate has return loss of −15.4 dB within the operating frequency range 7.59 GHz-8.00 GHz with the corresponding resonating frequency of 7.78 GHz. The gain of the propounded antenna using white leather substrate has high gain of 8.06 dB and directivity of 7.99 dBi and percentage bandwidth of 5.26 percent. The observed return loss of the propounded antenna employing black leather is −11.06 dB with operating frequency range of 7.64 GHz–7.88 GHz with 7.75 GHz as the resonating frequency. The simulated gain using black leather as a substrate is 7.90 dB and directivity of 7.85 dBi with percentage bandwidth of 3.09 percent. CST Microwave Studio 2016 has been used for the construction of propounded antenna. The fabrication and successful testing of propounded antenna has been done using anechoic chamber and E5071C network analyzer. The experimental and simulated results have been tested and it has been observed that the practical results nearly match with simulated results. The antenna realization has been analyzed using three different types of leather as substrates and it has been concluded that the antenna consisting of brown leather as substrate gives the optimum performance having minimal losses.