Wide 3-dB beamwidth step-walled rectangular dielectric resonator antenna

Abstract

Wide angular coverage antennas despite being a requirement for many recent safety applications are a design challenge. Applications like Automotive Radars, GPS and telemetry all need an antenna with wide half-power beamwidths in both principal planes. A novel broadbeam aperture-coupled step-walled rectangular dielectric resonator antenna is proposed. The antenna consists of a central widest ceramic plate with two plates on each side with decreased widths creating stepped or staircase like walls. The dielectric resonator is centered over the feed slot. Two modes $T{E}_{111}^x$ and $T{E}_{113}^x$ are simultaneously excited. The antenna is shown to yield broadbeam radiation patterns at frequencies between Mode-I and Mode-III resonances. To validate the principal, a prototype is fabricated and measured. The antenna has measured operating frequency band ranging from 5.75 GHz to 7.23 GHz with broadbeam frequency band from 6.1 to 6.6 GHz. The measured xoz and yoz beamwidths range from ${120}^{\circ }$ to ${132}^{\circ }$ with measured gain from 4.5 dB to 5.5 dB in the broadbeam band.

Keywords:

• Broadbeam
• rectangular dielectric resonator antennas
• higher-order modes
• 3-dB beamwidth

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Dr. Huan Zhang, Dr. Chaoyi Cui, Mr. Hongwei Yu, Mr. Yixuan Zhang and Mr. Zhendong Wang from Xidian University and Kangkang Han from Northwestern Polytechnic University, Xi'an, China for their time and guidance in antenna fabrication and measurement.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This research received no external funding.

Notes on contributors

S. H. H. Mashhadi

S. H. H. Mashhadi received the B.E. degree in telecommunication (Electrical) engineering from Military College of Signals, National University of Sciences and Technology (NUST), Rawalpindi, Pakistan in 2007 and the M.S. degree in communication engineering in 2009 from the University of Manchester, UK where she was awarded ‘Agilent's Best Student Award’ and is currently pursuing Ph.D degree in information and communication engineering from Northwestern Polytechnical University (NPU), Xian, China. Her previous research has been on broadband monopole blade/fin antenna design for air-borne applications, broadband VHF high-power sleeved dipole designs, bi-conical high-power broadband antennas, textile dielectric resonator antennas (DRAs) for body area networks (BAN). Her current research includes investigation of several shapes of dielectric resonator antennas for achieving wide beam radiation patterns, substrate integrated waveguide (SIW) fed widebeam DRAs and arrays.

Yong-Chang Jiao

Yong-Chang Jiao (SM'13) received the B.S. degree in mathematics from Shanxi University, China, in 1984, and the M.S. degree in applied mathematics and Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from Xidian University, Xi'an, China, in 1987 and 1990, respectively. In 1990, he joined the Institute of Antennas and EM scattering, Xidian University, where he is currently a Professor. From March to June 1996, he was a JSPS Visiting Priority-Area Research Fellow with the University of Tsukuba, Japan. From October 1997 to January 1998 and from July 1999 to April 2000, he was a Research Associate with the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong. From March to September 2002, he was a Research Fellow with the City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong. He has authored or co-authored more than 250 papers in technical journals and conference proceedings. His papers have been cited more than 2500 times with an H-index of 28 (source: ISI Web of Science). His current research interests include antenna designs and computational electromagnetics. Dr. Jiao is a Senior Member of the Chinese Institute of Electronics (CIE) and a member of the Antenna Committee of CIE. He was elected a Deputy to the 9th, 10th, and 11th Shaanxi Provincial People's Congress. He was also a member of the Standing Committee of the 10th and 11th Shaanxi Provincial People's Congress.

Jingdong Chen

Jingdong Chen (M'99–SM'09) received the Ph.D. degree in pattern recognition and intelligence control from the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 1998. From 1998 to 1999, he was with ATR Interpreting Telecommunications Research Laboratories, Kyoto, Japan, where he conducted research on speech synthesis, speech analysis, as well as objective measurements for evaluating speech synthesis. He then joined the Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia, where he engaged in research on robust speech recognition and signal processing. From 2000 to 2001, he worked at ATR Spoken Language Translation Research Laboratories on robust speech recognition and speech enhancement. From 2001 to 2009, he was a Member of Technical Staff at Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, New Jersey, working on acoustic signal processing for telecommunications. He subsequently joined WeVoice Inc. in New Jersey, serving as the Chief Scientist. He is currently a professor at the Northwestern Polytechnical University in Xi'an, China. His research interests include acoustic signal processing, adaptive signal processing, speech enhancement, adaptive noise/echo control, microphone array signal processing, signal separation, and speech communication. Dr. Chen served as an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing from 2008 to 2014 and as a technical committee (TC) member of the IEEE Signal Processing Society (SPS) TC on Audio and Electroacoustics from 2007 to 2009. He is currently a member of the IEEE SPS TC on Audio and Acoustic Signal Processing, and a member of the editorial advisory board of the Open Signal Processing Journal. He was the General Co-Chair of ACM WUWNET 2018 and IWAENC 2016, the Technical Program Chair of IEEE TENCON 2013, a Technical Program Co-Chair of IEEE WASPAA 2009, IEEE ChinaSIP 2014, IEEE ICSPCC 2014, and IEEE ICSPCC 2015, and helped organize many other conferences. Dr. Chen received the 2008 Best Paper Award from the IEEE Signal Processing Society (with Benesty, Huang, and Doclo), the Best Paper Award from the IEEE Workshop on Applications of Signal Processing to Audio and Acoustics in 2011 (with Benesty), the Bell Labs Role Model Teamwork Award twice, respectively, in 2009 and 2007, and the Young Author Best Paper Award from the 5th National Conference on Man-Machine Speech Communications in 1998. He is a co-author of a paper for which his PhD Student, C. Pan, received the IEEE R10 (Asia-Pacific Region) Distinguished Student Paper Award (First Prize) in 2016. He was also a recipient of the Japan Trust International Research Grant from the Japan Key Technology Center in 1998 and the “Distinguished Young Scientists Fund” from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) in 2014.