An efficient approach to the analysis and synthesis of spherical-circular thin microstrip antennas

Microstrip antennas are nowadays an important topic of antenna theory and techniques, hence of modern antenna education. For a course to be most effective, students should be able to simulate such structures. A drawback, however, is that inexpensive CAD programs adopted in the classroom, such as PCAAD [1] and AMCLR [2], do not cover the analysis of conformed antennas, which by the way is also true of commercial software, such as IE3D [3] and Ansoft Designer [4]. Only expensive CAD tools, such as HFSS [5] and CST [6], provide for this kind of modeling, but, acquisition costs aside, they also require powerful computers, which might not be available for educational purposes. On the other hand, Mathematica®, an integrated technical computing software with a vast collection of built-in functions, has become a well-established applied mathematical tool in the education of engineers and physicists [7]. In particular, it has been successfully used in antenna courses as an important auxiliary tool for analyzing and designing planar microstrip and printed radiators [8]-[9]. Its powerful algorithms for calculating cylindrical and spherical harmonics functions make Mathematica® suitable for the analysis of conformed antennas. This paper reports a Mathematica®-based CAD software capable of performing the analysis and synthesis of spherical-circular thin microstrip antennas with high computational efficiency.