Electrically Small Antenna Leveraging Piezoelectric Resonance in Stacked Layers

Antenna miniaturization is applicable to many mobile communications applications where size, and weight, and power consumption are important design parameters. Recently there has been interest in electrically small antennae that leverage mechanical resonance and the piezoelectric effect to achieve several orders of magnitude performance improvements over metallic counterparts. This paper proposes a novel piezoelectric antenna structure utilizing stacked alternating polarization layers capable of scaling to larger electrical sizes while maintaining a usable impedance. The proposed structure was evaluated using a full wave piezoelectric finite element model at a size of <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$ka=7\times 10^{-3}$</tex> achieving a real impedance of 52.5 ohms and a theoretical radiation efficiency of <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$3.08\times 10^{-5}$</tex>.