Cylindrical Rods Artificial Dielectric Material Inspired Sub-wavelength and Directive Microstrip Antenna

In this paper two novel techniques are proposed, one for designing sub-wavelength antenna and the other for designing of directive patch antenna by utilizing cylindrical rods artificial dielectric. Rectangular patch antenna is taken as a reference antenna due to its low profile, simple structure, and easy fabrication. Cylindrical rods behave as artificial dielectric material at plasma frequency and are designed according to the resonant frequency range of reference patch antenna. Embedding of rods in the dielectric substrate of the patch makes it compact, improving its return loss and enhancing impedance bandwidth. A technique to increase the gain and directivity of patch antenna by utilizing cylindrical rods embedded superstrate is also proposed in this paper. Mathematical analysis of results is also provided in this research work. The proposed directive antenna has a gain of 7.01 dB and it resonates at 3.88 GHz with -32.81 dB of reflection coefficient. The presented antenna has applications in field of wireless communication.