An empirical study of computational optimisation techniques for microstrip antennas

An empirical study was performed (ongoing) to compare the efficiencies of various, until now untried, computational optimisation techniques for optimising microstrip antennas. The goal was to produce a dual-band probe fed antenna with bands centered at 3.5 and 4 GHz, each with a -10 dB, or less, return loss bandwidth of 100 MHz. Existing theory and studies at The University of York showed that optimising for directivity and polarisation was not necessary, thus making the problem considerably simpler. Results so far indicate that steady-state genetic algorithms are the most efficient optimisation techniques.