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Completed TRL 1 (started at 1, targeting 3)
Dr. Pour and the ECE Department at UAH have been designing, building, and testing advanced wideband antennas for many wireless applications. MSFC scientists have developed a very high performance, composite Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) sensor that has potential application in many of NASA's systems and sub-systems. MSFC and UAH are proposing to collaborate to incorporate an advanced wireless antenna design onto this SHM sensor, in order to make it wireless for these applications.
The proposed work will utilize the research background of NASA MSFC scientists, along with the ECE Department at UAH, to further develop the technology of custom antennas on 3D printed substrates for space applications. MSFC-developed composite polymer-ceramic-carbon nanotube and silver inks will be developed and used for this project and will be printed on MSFC multi-material 3D nScrypt printer.
The increasing demand of wireless communications necessitates technology advancements and functionality upgrades in the antenna unit, which is the pivotal component of any wireless communication system. In particular, compact and low-profile antennas with adaptive, multi- functional, reliable, and reconfigurable features are sought after in remote sensing and space applications. In antenna engineering, the reconfigurability is defined in terms of radiation pattern, main beam direction, operating frequency, impedance matching bandwidth, and polarization. Herein, a wideband printed antenna is proposed with reconfigurable radiation patterns in the form of axial and conical patterns. Such reconfigurable radiation patterns can be realized by multi Eigen- function radiating elements, such as microstrip and waveguide/horn antennas; among which microstrip patch antennas are excellent candidates for the proposed research, due to their attractive features such as light-weight, low-profile, compatibility with other electronic and microwave circuits, and ease of fabrication on both planar and conformal structures. The proposed antenna is an excellent candidate for further research in wireless diversity enhancement, phased arrays with conformal platforms, embedded antenna configuration, where composite, fiberglass, and rubber insulators may be used as Radome to protect the wireless sensor from harsh environment in space. All above mentioned configurations have promising potential for NASA applications, some of which are listed below:
A microstrip patch antenna consists of a metallic patch that is printed on a grounded dielectric slab. For thin substrates, the operating modes are mainly transverse magnetic (TM) modes. The corresponding multi-mode nature can be mathematically represented by Fourier series of their azimuthal modes. The circular microstrip patch antenna has a broadside radiation pattern with the main beam located at the theta = 0 degrees direction when n=1, representing the dominant TM11 mode; while the beam is scanned toward the end-fire direction for the higher order mode TMn1 with n≠1.
As a representative example, the corresponding radiation patterns of the TM11 and TM21 modes. It is worth mentioning that similar axial and conical beams can be realized by rectangular microstrip patch antennas, excited at their TM10 and TM20 modes, respectively, which will be presented in the preliminary results section. The difference is that their radiation functions will be governed by “Sinc” functions instead of Bessel functions.
In terms of frequency bandwidth, microstrip patch antennas are inherently narrowband resonators, which is one of their major drawbacks. Recently, much progress has been made to increase their frequency response using different techniques. To name a few, stacked patches, coplanar parasitic patches, thick substrates, and slot-loaded technique can be used to widen the bandwidth. The latter method has gained numerous attention, since the slot can be easily cut from either the ground plane or the patch. The principle of the slot-loaded technique can be best explained in terms of coupled tuned circuits. Resonant antennas, such as microstrip patches and slots are equivalent to an RLC circuit, and when used adjacent to each other, can behave similar to coupled tuned circuits. Wideband slot-loaded microstrip patch antennas were first proposed by Huynh and Lee in 1995, where a U-shaped slot was cut from the patch printed on a thick substrate, resulting in about 35% bandwidth. A number of efforts has been later made to analyze the behavior of U-slot patch antennas. In the aforementioned slot-antennas, the emphasis was placed on widening the impedance bandwidth of conventional microstrip patch antennas operating at their fundamental mode only, generating broadside radiation patterns, which needed a relatively thick foam/substrate in the order of tenths of a wavelength. It was also reported that the polarization of such slot-loaded patch antennas was not stable, as it changed to the orthogonal direction near the upper frequency band, along with poor cross polarization performance. As for the higher order patch antennas, only a U-slot rectangular patch antenna with conical patterns operating at the TM20 mode. However, the realized bandwidth was only ~12% with right-left asymmetric patterns having partial nulls at the boresight direction of the theta = 0 degrees.
Herein, a novel wideband, low-profile, slot-loaded microstrip patch antenna is proposed that is capable of generating reconfigurable radiation patterns, along with stable polarization, symmetric radiation patterns with enhanced cross polarization characteristics, printed on a thin dielectric composite sensor structure of approximately 150µm in thickness. This composite sensor has been developed for NASA Structural Health Monitoring and other sensing applications, where a sensitive piezoelectric or pyrometric response is required. Higher order mode microstrip patches will be investigated through decomposing the modes into their equivalent dominant modes, each of which is loaded by a U-slot with appropriate excitation and orientation to realize reconfigurable radiation patterns over a broad impedance-matched bandwidth, which is unprecedented to the best of our knowledge. The proposed work will utilize the research background of NASA MSFC scientists, along with the ECE Department at UAH, to further develop the technology of custom antennas on 3D printed substrates for space applications. MSFC-developed composite polymer-ceramic-carbon nanotube and silver inks will be developed and used for this project and will be printed on MSFC multi-material 3D nScrypt printer. The electromagnetic properties of the developed antennas, including radiation and scattering parameters, will be numerically investigated at UAH using full-wave Electromagnetic solvers. To validate the results, developed prototypes will be tested in the spherical near-field anechoic chamber of the University of Alabama in Huntsville.
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