Design of Barium Strontium Titanium (BST) array antenna

Abstract

A design of a 4x4 dielectric resonator (DR) microstrip patch array antenna with a 50 Ω microstrip transmission line feed is presented. The antenna was designed to operate at the Worldwide interoperability for Microwave Access (WiMAX) application. The proposed DR utilized a ferroelectric material, Barium Strontium Titanate (BST) in rectangular form, with high dielectric constant of 250. Simulations using CST Microwave Studio has been carried out in order to verify this design. Even when the geometry of the antenna is small, it was able to achieve large impedance bandwidth (for S11 < -10 dB) due to the addition of the high dielectric constant material (ε’ = 250). The experimental results for the BST array antenna were described while its return loss, gain, directivity, polarization and radiation characteristics of the antenna were studied. VSWR found to be less than 2, and good omni-directional radiation pattern characteristics was successfully obtained. The simulation results were in good agreement with the desired frequency band of 2.3-2.4 GHz.