Performance Analysis of Spherical Stacked-Patch Antennas

The interest for spherical arrays is based on their possibility to direct single or multiple beams through complete hemisphere. In this article, circular stacked-patch antennas embedded in a multilayer spherical structure are analyzed using the spectral-domain approach and the moment method. The influence of structure radius on input impedance, mutual coupling and radiation pattern is investigated. It is shown that the properties the most affected by the variation of structure radius are the resonant frequency and the mutual coupling level. The results confirm the importance of rigorous analysis of curved patch antennas. Furthermore, a laboratory model is built to validate the developed program. The agreement between measured and calculated results is good.