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10.1109/LAWP.2015.2421356, IEEE Antennas and Wireless Propagation Letters
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Electrically Small Metamaterial-Inspired
Tri-Band Antenna with Meta-mode
Cheng Zhu, Member, IEEE, Tong Li, Ke Li, Zi-Jian Su, Xin Wang, Hui-Qing Zhai, Member, IEEE,
Long Li, Senior Member, IEEE, and Chang-Hong Liang, Senior Member, IEEE
Abstract — Two novel metamaterial-inspired antennas The conventional approach to realize a multi-band antenna is
applied for 4G mobile communication are proposed in this to design multi resonators to obtain several distinctive radiation
letter. Antenna 1 takes a triangular electromagnetic mode. For example, a dual-band RHCP antenna was designed
resonator (TER) as its radiator fed by a coplanar using proximity-fed stacked patch with quadrature phase
waveguide (CPW). After the model building and simulation, feeding [1]. By etching slots (e.g., L-shaped or I-shaped slots)
three frequency bands of 1.78~1.84GHz, 2.34~3.86 GHz on the surface of a printed inverted “F” antenna (PIFA), the
and 5.75~5.87 GHz are achieved. Each band is well matched PIFA can be operated in three frequency bands [2]. Also, A
except for the band 3. Therefore, Antenna 2 is further compact tri-band planar monopole antenna could be achieved
developed, which adds a complementary TER (CTER) on by employing reactive loading and a “defected” ground-plane
the ground, and the improved design has a good impedance structure [3]. Besides, fractal geometry could be introduced into
matching in band 3 without influencing the first two bands. the tri-band antenna design [4].
Both antennas have operational bands covering WiMAX in Split ring resonator (SRR) and complementary SRR (CSRR),
1.8/3.5 GHz and WLAN in 5.8 GHz and omnidirectional providing the magnetic response (mu-negative, MNG) and
radiation patterns during the operating bands. The electric response (epsilon-negative, ENG) respectively, are
proposed two metamaterials antennas have the advantages essential parts to constitute the left-handed metamaterial (LHM).
of simple fabrication, miniaturization and compactness, And they have been widely adopted in various kinds of
which can be applied to the 4G wireless mobile multiband antenna design to increase the number of working
communication system. frequency point and shrink the size of antenna [5-8]. Based on
the previous research, triangular electromagnetic resonator
Index Terms— Metamaterial-inspired Antenna, (TER) [9] is a kind of typical metamaterials with electric and
Triangular Elctromagnetic Resonator (TER), Meta-mode, magnetic response at distinct frequency regime, which also be
coplanar waveguide (CPW) applied into the antenna design.
In this letter, two novel triband metamaterial antennas are
proposed with TER and CTER. With one TER unit as a radiator
I. INTRODUCTION in the monopole design, Antenna 1 operates in three bands at
1.8/3.5/5.8 GHz (band 1, band 2, and band 3), which cover the
N OWADAYS, extensive researchers in the field of wireless
communication have concentrated their research on the
multiband microstrip antenna, which could be applied in
desired bands for WLAN and WiMAX applications. In Antenna
2, an additional CTER etched on the ground is employed to
4G mobile communication, multiple-input–multiple-output improve the impendence matching of band 3, without
(MIMO) systems, bluetooth system, as well as wireless power influencing first two bands of Antenna 1. The experiments are
transfer. Compared to conventional antennas (e.g., horn antenna operated to demonstrate the effectiveness and validation of the
or Yagi–Uda antenna), microstrip antennas [1]–[4] have proposed two antennas.
advantages of light weight and low profile and allow easy
integration with surface-mount devices, which are more II. ANTENNA DESIGN AND ANALYSIS
promising and flexible in dual-band or tri-band operations.
Antenna 1 (with TER loading)
The structure of Antenna 1 is shown in Fig. 1(a) and the
antenna simply consists of a TER radiator and CPW feeding line.
This work is supported by a grant from the National High Technology The radiating element is the TER which is printed on a dielectric
Research and Development Program of China (863 Program)
(No.2012AA01A308), National Natural Science Foundation of China under
substrate with relative permittivity of 2.65 and thickness of 1
Contract No. 61401335, No. 61101066, No. 51477126 and, Natural Science mm. The overall dimension is 35×38×1 mm3. The antennas
Basic Research Plan in Shaanxi Province of China (No. 2014JQ8352), and the have an operational band covering the WiMAX/WLAN and
Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities. they are fed by a CPW which can be easily integrated with the
Cheng Zhu, Tong Li, Ke Li, Zi-Jian Su, Xin Wang, Hui-Qing Zhai, Long Li
and Chang-Hong Liang are with the Key Laboratory of Science and
patch on the same side of the substrate. The CPW is connected
Technology on Antennas and Microwaves, Xidian University, Xi’an, 710071, to the coaxial cable through a 50 Ω SMA connector. All the
P. R. China (e-mail: [email protected]). structures are simulated by using ANSYS HFSS based on the
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finite-element method (FEM). Since all the triangles in the TER, respectively, which could also be observed from Fig. 2.
designs are equilateral triangles and the head of the lower Besides, according to our previous research results [9], we
triangle overlap some parts of its head with the feeding line, so can obtain the equivalent circuit of TER from the surface
the horizontal side length of the lower triangle is 17mm and current distribution and then the equivalent inductor (L) and
a1=16mm. equivalent capacitor (C) could be obtained by geometric
dimensions from formulae. Similarly, the equivalent circuit
model of proposed antenna could also be obtained by surface
current distribution of the monopole radiator at different
frequencies. After the equivalent circuit is obtained, the
working frequency of the proposed antenna could be calculated
by
0 1 / LC .(1)
It should be noted that the coupling between the TER and
CPW feeding line is not considered in the formula above, which
only allow us to obtain the approximate ω0. In order to get more
accurate resonant frequency and fully account for the coupling
effect, it is necessary to optimize the antenna by full-wave
(a)
simulation in HFSS.
(a) TER and its equivalent circuit [9]
(b)
Fig. 1. (a) Schematic diagram of Antenna 1 (with TER loading). (b) The
simulated and measured S11 of antenna 1
TABLE I DIMENSIONS OF THE PROPOSED ANTENNA 1 (Units: mm) (b)
lg 14.5 a1 16 d 1
wg 13 a2 10
wf 5.5 g 2
gf 0.2 w 1
The main dimensions of Antenna 1are listed in Table I.
After parameters sweep and structure optimization, Antenna 1
can operate in three bands which are also shown in Fig. 1. The (c)
operate bands can cover 1.8/3.5-GHz WiMAX and 5.8 GHz
WLAN. Comparing with S11 of a conventional monopole
antenna, two additional operational bands are achieved for
Antenna 1. In order to adjust the impendence matching of
Antenna 1, the width of CPW feed line and the dimensions of
the TER are all optimized. However, band 3 could not be ideally
adjusted compared with the first two bands. (d)
To further investigate the working mechanism of three Fig. 2 Surface current distribution and equivalent circuit model. (a) TER, (b)
bands of antenna 1, surface current distributions at different Antenna 1 at 1.8 GHz, (c) Antenna 1 at 3.0 GHz, (d) Antenna 1 at 5.8 GHz.
frequencies are given in Fig. 2. Previously in our paper, the
characteristic of TER has been carefully discussed [9]. As In order to find the influences on the resonant frequencies
shown in Fig. 2(a), the lowest mode (electric response) of TER with different structural parameters, a parametric study has been
has the strongest current on its center axis, which is very similar carried out. By alerting δa (δa = a1-a2) and fixing other
with the current distribution in band 1. So, we could alternately parameters, the simulated S11 of Antenna 1 is shown in Fig. 3.
understand band 1 of Antenna 1 is the result of electric response, As the value of δa varies from 4 mm to 6 mm while the value of
also known as the meta-mode. Moreover, the band 2 and band 3 a1 maintains to be 16 mm. The center frequency of the Band 3
are formed by the excitation of larger and smaller triangle of decreases with the increase of δa and the other two bands remain
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stable. Band 1 slightly changes towards the lower frequency as
the middle line of TER increase a little as δa increases, which
could be judged by the surface distribution in Fig. 2. Therefore,
the operating bands of antenna 1 could be easily adjusted by
altering some parameters.
(a)
Fig. 3. Effects of variation of different δa on the S11 performances of the
antenna 1
ANTENNA 2(with TER and CTER Loading)
Since the input impedance ( Z L C ) of Antenna 1 in the
third band is not well matched to 50 Ω, the reflection coefficient
is not good as compared with the first two bands. Therefore,
CTER is introduced to Antenna 2 to change the current
distribution and also the input impedance. The results show that (b)
the third band of Antenna 2 is better matched than that of Fig. 4. (a) Schematic diagram of Antenna 2 (with TER and CTER loading). (b)
The simulated and measured S11 of antenna 2
Antenna 1.
According to the Babinet Principle, the L of complementary TABLE II DIMENSIONS OF THE PROPOSED ANTENNA 2 (Units: mm)
TER (CTER) corresponds to the C of TER and also the C of lg 14.5 a1 16 d 1
CTER corresponds to the L of TER. So we can still use the wg 13 a2 10 as 8
wf 5.5 g 2 gs 2
formula (1) to design the geometry of CTER so as to let it
gf 0.2 w 1 ws 0.5
resonate at the third frequency. By adding CTER in Antenna 1,
the structure of Antenna 2 is obtained as shown in Fig. 4(a). The
CTER is directly printed on the left part of the ground. The
introduction of CTER in Antenna 2 is used to change the current
distribution on the ground and try to make a better impedance
match for band 3.
The simulated and measured S11 of Antenna 2 are shown in
Fig. 4(b). The first and second band of Antenna 1 are kept in
Antenna 2, meanwhile, Band 3 in Antenna 1 is improved to a
better match effect. All the dimensions of Antenna 2 are the
same with Antenna 1 except for CTER, of which the dimensions
are as=8.0mm, gs=2.0mm, and ws=0.5mm. Fig. 5. Surface current distribution of Antenna 2 at band 3
From Fig. 5, the current has been rearranged due to the
presence of CTER and then the impedance matching is further
improved. In Fig. 6, the real parts of impedance of antenna 1 and
antenna 2 are highly similar. However, the imaginary parts of
impedance of antenna 1 and antenna 2 are also similar except
for band 3. The reactance of antenna 2 goes near zero while the
reactance of antenna 1 stay positive in the regime of band 3.
Since the CTER is capacitive due to the excitation of external
electric field, the reactance of antenna 2 has the value near zero
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which improve the impedance matching of band 3 in antenna 2, E-Plane H-Plane
(yoz Plane) (xoz Plane)
which is shown in Fig. 6.
Fig. 8 Measured (solid black line) and simulated (short dash red line) radiation
patterns of Antenna 1 at(a) 1.8GHz, (b) 3.5 GHz
(a)
Fig. 6 The real part and imaginary part of impedance of Antenna 1 and Antenna
2
III. EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS (b)
(c)
E-Plane H-Plane
(yoz Plane) (xoz Plane)
Fig. 7 Photograph of proposed Antenna 1 and Antenna 2 Fig. 9 Measured (solid line) and simulated (dotted line) radiation patterns for
Antenna 2 at(a) 1.8 GHz, (b) 3.5GHz, and (c) 5.8 GHz.
After the optimization and fabrication, the photo the two
antennas is shown in Fig. 7. Furthermore, the measured and
simulated E-plane and H-plane radiation patterns of the
proposed Antenna 1 and Antenna 2 at resonant frequencies are
shown in Fig. 7 and 8. It can be seen that the measured results
are good agreement with simulated results. From the results
above, it is observed that both antennas have stable
(a)
omnidirectional radiation pattern in H-plane and 8-shape
radiation pattern in the E-plane. Besides, compared with
Antenna 1, the E-plane radiation patterns of three bands of
Antenna 2 have a little asymmetry, which is the result of adding
the structure of CTER, but that asymmetry doesn't influence the
radiation performance of Antenna 2.
IV. CONCLUSION
Two compact, planar, and CPW-fed triple band antenna
inspired by TER with/without CTER has been designed,
fabricated, and measured. Antenna 1 covers two frequency
(b)
bands corresponding to WiMax and WLAN. By loading CTER
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into Antenna 2, a better impedance matching is obtained at band
3 without influencing band 1 and band 2. Both antennas show an
omnidirectional radiation pattern for WLAN and WiMAX
frequency bands. The proposed two antennas have the
advantage of simple structure and easy fabrication and they
could be widely applied in different 4G wireless devices.
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