A Spurious-Free Characteristic Mode Formulation Based on Surface Integral Equation for Patch Antenna Structures

Conventional surface integral equation (SIE)-based characteristic mode formulation for the patch antenna structure with a finite substrate is susceptible to the spurious (nonphysical) modes due to the dielectric part. To avoid the contamination of spurious modes, we propose a novel generalized eigenvalue formulation based on the electric field integral equation-coupled Poggio–Miller–Chang–Harrington–Wu–Tsai equation. In this formulation, the real and imaginary parts of the exterior integral operators are chosen to construct the finalized weighting matrices, to connect the radiated power of the characteristic current. Compared with other SIE-based methods, this equation does not need additional postprocessing since it can effectively avoid spurious modes. Numerical results compared with the volume-SIE are investigated to validate the accuracy.