Nickel zinc ferrite thick film as substrate overlay for improved performance of microstrip patch antenna

Abstract

In this paper, nickel zinc ferrite (NZF) nanopowder was mixed with organic vehicle which consists of linseed oil, m-xylene and α-terpineol. Then the mixture was sonicated for 1 hour at 40°C in order to obtain homogenous paste, followed by printing it onto FR4 substrate using the screen printing technique to form the NZF thick film layer before dried at 100°C and later fired at 200°C. A basic square shape patch antenna by using silver paste was printed onto the NZF thick film layer and was compared with another patch antenna which was been printed without the NZF layer. The results showed that the antenna with NZF thick film layer has return loss of -10.97dB, resonant frequency 6.42GHz, bandwidth 3.9 and Q factor of 1.646, which is better compared to the antenna without the layer by 32.81%, 3.22%, 86.60% and 44.69% respectively.