Novel Stitched Ground Plane Optimizations for Microstrip Patch Antennas at Wi-Fi and WiMAX Applications

Abstract

This work explores the optimal mesh structure, stitch density and production technique of stitched ground plane for microstrip patch antenna. Meshed ground plane was used as a generic problem. A stitched ground plane is pro-posed and designed using Matlab interface to computer embroidery. Using the meshed or stitched ground plane as a case study, the resistance between meshes was analysed and measured. The equivalent resistance between nodes is a function of their distance apart. A finite resistive grid was simulated and compared to measured sets of data. A microstrip patch antenna with stitched ground shows comparable performance to the conventional etched ground of the size in terms of bandwidth. The stitched ground plane has a higher band-width than the etched copper ground plane because of the increased thickness of the substrate. Thus, it can be concluded that the use of the interface method shows the possibilities of controlling the stitch density and distances between mesh nodes. The interface increases the stitching density and reduces the elec-trical resistance between mesh nodes making the antennas flexible and weara-ble. The functionality of these antenna samples has been tested and validated using microstrip patch ground at 2.45 GHz and 5 GHz. Measurement results on the proposed stitched ground planes were compared with the theory of infinite resistive network that shows good agreement.