1. Field
The present disclosure is related to antennas, and more specifically, to patch antennas.
2. Related Art
At present, there is a need for antennas that can conform to non-planar, curved surfaces such as aircraft fuselages and wings, ships, land vehicles, buildings, or cellular base stations. Furthermore, conformal antennas reduce radar cross section, aerodynamic drag, are low-profile, and have minimal visual intrusion.
Existing phased array antennas generally include a plurality of antenna elements such as, for example, dipole or patch antennas integrated with electronics that may control the phase and/or magnitude of each antenna element. These phased array antennas are typically complex, expensive, and may be integrated into the surface of an object to which they are designed to operate on. Furthermore, existing phased arrays are generally susceptible to the electromagnetic effects caused by the surfaces on which they are placed, especially if the surfaces are composed of metal (e.g., aluminum, steel, titanium, etc.) or carbon fiber, which is electrically conductive by nature. As such, to compensate for these effects the phased arrays need to be designed taking into account the shape and material of a surface on which they will be placed and, as such, are not flexible for use across multiple types of surfaces, platforms, or uses.
Existing antennas typically have a trade-off between the thickness of the antenna and the bandwidth. A thin antenna, for example, is more flexible, but has a narrower bandwidth. Moreover, existing antennas based on patch antenna elements have a gain-bandwidth product (“GBWP”) that is related to the thickness of the antenna such that antennas with low thickness (for conformal applications) have low GBWP. As such, there is a need for a new conformal antenna that addresses these issues.