Microstrip Array Antenna with Left Handed Metamaterial at C-Band
Abhishek Awasthi1, Garima Saini2
1Abhishek Awasthi, Student, M.E. Electronics and Communication Engineering, National Institute of Technical Teachers Training and Research, Chandigarh, India.
2Mrs. Garima Saini,  Assistant Professor, Electronics and Communication Engineering, National Institute of Technical Teachers Training and Research, Chandigarh, India.
Manuscript received on January 21, 2014. | Revised Manuscript received on February 05, 2014. | Manuscript published on February 28, 2014. | PP: 377-380  | Volume-3, Issue-3, February 2014. | Retrieval Number:  C2715023314/2013©BEIESP

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© The Authors. Blue Eyes Intelligence Engineering and Sciences Publication (BEIESP). This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/)

Abstract: Left-handed Metamaterial (LHM) is an artificial material where the permittivity and permeability are simultaneously negative at a certain range of frequency. One of the unique properties of the LHM is its negative refraction index which produces focusing effect to the wave propagating through the LHM. With this unique property, the LHM structures are used to increase the low gain of the microstrip antenna. In this work, an LHM structure consists of a modified split ring resonator (MSRR) and two capacitance loaded strip (CLS) is proposed. The MSRR has four slots in the middle of the structure which create wider range of negative permittivity and permeability. The MSRR exhibits negative permeability while the CLS exhibits negative permittivity. For the simulation process CST MICROWAVE STUDIO has been used. The metamaterial antenna presented in this paper is designed to operate at 7.3328 GHz and is employed for ultra-wideband (UWB) applications; which operates in C band. The substrate used is FR4 Board (Fire Retarded 4) with a dielectric constant of 4.7, thickness of 1.6 mm and a tangential loss of 0.019. The design yields return loss <-30dB. Simulations also show that the metamaterial antenna has improvement in gain compared to the arrray patch antenna.
Keywords: Array antenna, Left-handed Metamaterial, Ultra-wideband, Slip ring resonator, Capacitance loaded strip.