Full wave analysis of the arbitrarily arranged spherical conformal microstrip antenna array

Abstract

The surface integral equation is adopted to analyse the characteristics of the arbitrarily arranged spherical conformal microstrip antenna array based on the moment method. The Rao–Wilton–Glisson basis function and triangle function are used to simulate equivalent current on the patch and probe, respectively. A novel basis function at the junction of wire and surface is proposed to ensure continuity of the current from probe to patch. Then, the magnetic frill loop is used as excitation source in this study, and the field on the antenna surface generated by magnetic frill loop is deduced with the help of magnetic dyadic Green's functions on the surface of sphere. For the antenna array analysis, the characteristic basis function method combined with equivalent dipole method is employed to save the consumed memory and computation time. The characteristics of several pairs of conformal spherical microstrip antennas are presented and shown to be in good agreement with data from literatures and FEKO software. At last, a result comparison between the method in this study and FEKO software is drawn to show the efficiency of this method.