Broadband high gain meta-material based resonant cavity antenna

A broadband high gain planar meta-material based Resonant Cavity Antenna (RCA) is proposed operating at C-band. The RCA is modelled using simple ray tracing method. The unit cell metamaterial consists of Artificial Magnetic Conductor (AMC) and square patch laminated on either side of low loss commercial dielectric material of dielectric constant 2.4 & thickness 0.813mm, is used as the superstrate to designed RCA. Square patch is capacitive type and that AMC as inductive. Effects of the reflection phase of the substrate decides the high gain of the antenna. A cylindrical dielectric resonator antenna (CDRA) has been used as the primary radiator. The metamaterial unit cell structure is characterized and its effective material parameters showing meta-material characteristics are extracted through its S-parameters simulation. The proposed antenna achieves 22.4dBi gain with 2 layers of 4×4 array superstrate with bandwidth of around 2.8GHz. The proposed 2 layer structure will be optimized for height of the cavity using Particle Swam Optimization technique, whose result will be published at the conference.