Design and Performance Analysis of Step Graded Dielectric Profile High Gain Flexible Textile Antennas for Radiolocation Military and Aeronautical Radio Navigation Applications

Abstract

This paper emphasizes on the analysis of stacking different dielectric materials forming step graded profile along the thickness of the substrate in the microstrip patch antenna design. The different step graded dielectric profiles have been employed to design antennas and the performance of proposed antennas have been analyzed in terms of gain (dB), directivity (dBi), return loss (dB), VSWR, half power beam width (degrees), total efficiency (dB), side lobe level (dB) and impedance bandwidth (MHz). The stacking of three flexible textile materials namely fleece, felt and curtain cotton having dielectric constant of 1.04, 1.35 and 1.47, respectively have been used as substrate material to obtain six step graded dielectric profile antenna configurations which are P1, P2, P3, P4, P5 and P6. It has been concluded that the profile P3 having staircase dielectric profile is the best suited antenna configuration due to effective return loss, high gain, directivity and HPBW. The step graded dielectric profile antenna designs have been practically fabricated employing copper material as patch, feedline and ground having conductivity of 5.96 × 107 S/m. The performance of fabricated antennas has been analyzed practically by employing E5071C network analyzer and anechoic chamber. It has been observed that practical results intently match with the simulated results of the proposed antenna configurations. The proposed antenna configurations can be suitably employed for Military Radiolocation and Aeronautical Radio navigation applications as the proposed antenna configuration is resonant at 16.262 GHz which matches with the corresponding resonant frequency range of 15.6–16.6 GHz.