An Analytic Synthesis Method for Two-Element Biomimetic Antenna Arrays

An analytic technique for synthesizing two-element biomimetic antenna arrays (BMAAs) is presented. This method addresses the shortcomings of previous methods used to design such arrays, which uniformly relied on using a numerical optimization procedure to find acceptably suboptimal solutions for the design of the coupling networks of such arrays. We first present an analytic method for determining all possible S-parameters that satisfy the requirements of the four-port external coupling network (ECN) of a two-element BMAA. Subsequently, all possible lumped element implementations of the ECNs are presented. Finally, we present a method for determining the values of the reactive elements constituting the ECN from its S-matrix. We demonstrate the proposed design procedure for a BMAA consisting of two 10.3 cm-long monopole antennas separated by 5 cm. The design procedure is used to determine the reactive elements constituting the ECNs for two (out of infinity) S-matrices and 13 different ECN architectures. Two representative coupling networks were also fabricated and the responses of the BMAAs using them were experimentally characterized. The measurement results are found to be in good agreement with the simulations, verifying the validity of the proposed synthesis technique.