Abstract
In many applications, wide frequency bandwidth and conformability to a curved surface are two important features for microstrip antennas. In this paper, a microstrip antenna that is of wide bandwidth and conformal with cylinder is presented. It is composed of four microstrip dipoles with different lengths and widths to enlarge its bandwidth and mounted on a dielectric cylinder. The antenna is optimized in an automated design, making use of the Genetic Algorithm (GA) with the full-wave EM simulation based on the Finite-Difference Time-Domain (FDTD) and cluster parallel computation. A design result is presented. A prototype of the designed antenna has been fabricated and tested. Good agreement is obtained between the simulated and measured results, and results show the proposed conformal microstrip antenna obtains a wide S 11 < −10 dB impedance bandwidth of surpassing 37% (from 2.15 GHz to 3.10 GHz).