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Abstract
A surface wave driven plasma Yagi-Uda monopole array composed of several surface wave driven plasma monopole elements is proposed and studied with finite difference time domain simulation in this work. By varying the excitation power of plasma monopoles, a reconfigurable antenna is obtained for different frequencies. Plasma monopoles are fed by RF power at 500 MHz through an unequal power divider with a fixed power division ratio and a surface wave discharge at gas pressure of 0.4 mb. The results show that while the variations of the excitation power shift the Yagi-Uda resonant frequency between 0.6 to 1.6 of the initial center frequency, the array gain and directivity remain approximately unchanged in the new resonant frequency. Since efficiency is critical to communication systems, the total efficiencies of the reconfigurable array were analyzed from the least to the highest excitation power. At the least excitation power the efficiency was found to be 58%, compared with the 24% efficiency of the highest excitation power.