Analysis of Conformal Microstrip Antennas With the Discrete Mode Matching Method

An extension of the discrete mode matching (DMM) method is used to analyze microstrip antennas conformed to cylinders. The structure needs to be discretized only along the azimuthal and the axial directions by sampling the fields and current densities in the interfaces between dielectric layers. The solution in the radial direction is obtained analytically with the dyadic Green's function, which is calculated using the full-wave equivalent circuit (FWEC) in the spectral domain. The structure is truncated in the axial direction by employing absorbing boundary conditions (ABCs). The mathematical formulation is given in this paper, followed by its application to compute the main properties of conformal microstrip antennas, such as resonant frequency, radiation patterns and input impedance. Validation with the commercial software HFSS has been done and good agreement between the results has been observed.