Dynamics of Antenna Reactive Energy Using Time-Domain IDM Method

A general computational paradigm, the time-domain infinitesimal dipole model (IDM) method, is developed and applied to compute reactive energy and radiated power for arbitrary shaped antennas with different time-domain excitations. The proposed technique first utilizes finite-difference time-domain method to compute the time-domain radiating antenna currents from near-zone electric/magnetic fields. Further, the far-zone time-domain radiated power is analytically estimated using a suitable IDM of the antenna spacetime current distributions. The time-domain reactive energy is calculated by adopting a rigorous energy subtraction approach. The proposed time-domain IDM technique is first validated by reproducing the standard antenna-Q-factor results of half-wavelength thin-wire dipoles. Second, time-domain reactive energy signatures are obtained for pulse-excited single and multiband dipole antennas, both in isolated condition and two-element multi-in multi-out (MIMO) topology. Third, the effects of parasitic reflector and director elements on the spatio-temporal energy dynamics of thin-wire Yagi-Uda antennas are demonstrated. The proposed algorithm is very general, applicable to arbitrary antenna shape and spacetime excitations, and hence is expected to enable engineers to look beyond traditional single frequency Q-factors of electrically small antennas to probe into the more fundamental spatio-temporal energy dynamics of general radiating structures, especially future generation 5G MIMO antennas.