A reciprocity approach for determining radiation patterns of patch antennas on circularly-cylindrical platforms

There has been rapidly growing interest in conformal patch antennas that can be mounted on arbitrarily curved surfaces. One of the major factors influencing the popularity of these antennas is their potentially useful application in mobile communication systems. This has also fueled a need for more powerful and versatile computational modeling techniques for this class of antennas. We present an efficient method, based on the reciprocity theorem, for calculating the radiation patterns of patch antennas mounted on circularly cylindrical platforms when the current distribution on the patches is available from previous computations. The major advantages of this approach are that it does not require the evaluation of complicated layered media Green´s functions for curved geometrics and circumvents the need to calculate time consuming Sommerfeld integrals. The technique also has the highly desirable feature that it is easily generalizable to patch antennas of arbitrary shape.