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I. INTRODUCTION
N MANY applications, it is desirable that an antenna perform the same way at every frequency. Rumsey summarized
the features that an antenna with this property would have [1].
Prior to his work, it had been observed that the impedance and
radiation pattern of an antenna vary only with the geometry as
described in wavelengths. As a consequence, changing the operating frequency of an antenna is equivalent to scaling its geometry. This is referred to as the scaling principle or principle of
similitude. Rumsey suggested that an antenna with a geometry
that was invariant to scaling transformations would be frequency
independent.
Geometries that satisfy this requirement must be infinitely
large. However, finite approximations to these antennas may
still have arbitrarily large bandwidths if the finite antenna radiates in the same way as the infinite one. In order to truncate
the antenna properly, at any particular frequency, the majority
of the radiation from the infinite antenna must be concentrated
in a finite region. Rumsey referred to this necessity as the truncation principle.
The class of geometries that are identical after a scaling
transformation consists of angular and conic sections such as
infinitely large biconical antennas or bowties. Unfortunately,
geometries of this type depend on their truncation to radiate
effectively, and consequently fail to adhere to Rumseys truncation principle.
Manuscript received March 30, 2007; revised July 17, 2007. This work
was supported in part by the U.S. Army Research Office under Contract
DAAD19-02-1-0252 and the U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center Near-Surface Phenomenology Program under Contract
912HZ-07-C-0026.
The authors are with the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering,
Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA 30332-0250 USA (e-mail:
m.mcfadden@gatech.edu; waymond.scott@ece.gatech.edu).
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TAP.2007.908838
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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ANTENNAS AND PROPAGATION, VOL. 55, NO. 11, NOVEMBER 2007
MCFADDEN AND SCOTT: ANALYSIS OF THE EQUIANGULAR SPIRAL ANTENNA ON A DIELECTRIC SUBSTRATE
3165
Fig. 4. Comparison of measured and FDTD reactance for the Foamclad and
3 mm, and R
Rogers substrate with design parameters
79 , R
0.114 m.
Fig. 3. Comparison of measured and FDTD resistance for the Foamclad and
Rogers substrate with design parameters
79 , R
3 mm, and R
0.114 m.
Fig. 5. Comparison of measured and FDTD gain results for the Foamclad sub3 mm, and R
0.114 m.
79 , R
strate with design parameters
V. IMPEDANCE
With the veracity of the numerical results established, several graphs were constructed from simulation data in order to
present the effect of the dielectric on the impedance of the spiral
antenna. In this section, the theoretical value for the impedance
of the spiral is discussed and a plot of the impedance as a function of the most important parameters is provided.
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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ANTENNAS AND PROPAGATION, VOL. 55, NO. 11, NOVEMBER 2007
Fig. 6. Comparison of measured and FDTD gain results for the Rogers sub79 , R
3 mm, and R
0.114 m.
strate with design parameters
Fig. 7. Real impedance curves for spirals designed to be (top to bottom): 188
,
148
, and 108
. The triangular markers denote the edges of the operating
band. The dashed lines show the calculated characteristic impedance, defined
here to be the average in the operating band.
A. Impedance Curves
Spiral antenna impedance curves tend to show three distinct
regions of behavior. The lower frequencies are dominated by
the outer truncation, the upper frequency behavior relates to
the inner truncation, and the behavior in the intermediate frequencies is determined by the shape of the spiral curve itself.
Portions of the traveling wave model proposed by Kaiser for
the Archimedean spiral will be used to explain the form of the
curves in a manner similar to [15].
Using the auxiliary 1-D transmission line described in
Section III, impedance curves as a function of frequency were
calculated for the spiral on the substrates of interest. The real
parts of some of these curves are shown in Fig. 7. The imaginary portions are very similar but have an average value of zero
regardless of the dielectric.
79 ,
The spirals used in Fig. 7 had the parameters
3 mm, and
0.114 m. Each spiral shown had a 1.27-mm-
MCFADDEN AND SCOTT: ANALYSIS OF THE EQUIANGULAR SPIRAL ANTENNA ON A DIELECTRIC SUBSTRATE
3167
Fig. 8. Z as a function of , R
0.1143 m, R
3 mm, and h
1.27 mm. Dashed values show the impedance estimate in (2) and (3).
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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ANTENNAS AND PROPAGATION, VOL. 55, NO. 11, NOVEMBER 2007
impedance is always changing along the line, this is an extremely slow variation and it can be assumed that along the ring
remains constant at some
that constitutes the active region,
value
. Since the transmission lines, like the spiral arms,
are assumed lossless, the power in the wave remains constant.
Therefore, the current in this region remains constant as well.
This then implies that the radiation from the spiral will be that
from a traveling ring of current with circumference (here,
is the wavelength of the traveling wave in the active region and
is distinguished from the free-space wavelength ). The radiation from a harmonically varying current distribution of angular
frequency is well known and the details of the integration necessary for a traveling ring of current can be found in [27]. For a
ring of circumference , one obtains a radiated field
dielectric does
value.
VI. GAIN
The NFFFT was used to determine the radiated field on bore
sight for the spiral antenna. The radiated field and simulated
impedance were used to derive the directivity of the spiral. Since
in this study the conductors are all considered perfect, this value
is also the gain on bore sight. Example curves are shown in
Fig. 10 for various dielectric constants.
In this section, the behavior of the bore-sight gain as a function of frequency will be examined. The primary effect of the
dielectric discussed here will be the tendency of the gain to deteriorate as frequency increases. In addition, the presence of a
ripple in the gain plots will be related to the outer truncation of
the spiral.
(5)
is the radiated field in phasor form with an assumed
where
time dependence, is the free-space propagation constant,
defined as
, and
is the magnitude of the traveling ring of current in the active region. Equation (5) shows the
expected result that the radiated wave at bore sight is circularly
polarized. If the current and impedance at the feed point are deand
, respectively, and the effective permittivity in
noted
, one may use (5) to write
the active region ring is denoted
the gain in terms of the known radiated power per unit area on
and the power inserted into the spiral
bore sight
(6)
(7)
(8)
Assuming that prior to reaching the ring there was no loss in the
traveling wave, one may write
(9)
(10)
(11)
where
is the power in the wave at the active region and (4)
is used in the derivation of (11).
This means that the free-space spiral should radiate a constant
gain of at all frequencies. However, for a spiral on a dielectric
substrate, the gain can be expected to monotonically decrease as
the frequency increases, moving the active region inward toward
moves upwards towards its value
the feed. As this occurs,
.
near the feed of approximately
Some effort was put into finding a relationship between
and the frequency in order to obtain a functional form for the
gain using a transmission line approximation, but aside from the
MCFADDEN AND SCOTT: ANALYSIS OF THE EQUIANGULAR SPIRAL ANTENNA ON A DIELECTRIC SUBSTRATE
3169
limiting values discussed previously, the match was unsatisfactory. The effect on the gain is directly related to the failure of
the antenna to truly satisfy Rumseys scaling principle. If the dielectric thickness were to increase as the wave moved outward,
could conceivably be kept constant and this would imply
the
that the gain would remain constant. The data shown in Figs. 5
and 6 show this decreasing behavior with a rate of descent that
becomes steeper with a higher dielectric constant. This is again
seen in Fig. 10, here with simulated data. In addition to the decreasing gain, a gain ripple is observed with an amplitude of
approximately 1 to 2 dB. It will be shown in Section VI-B that
this ripple is related to the outer truncation of the spiral.
B. Bore-Sight Gain Ripple
The ripples seen in Figs. 5, 6, and 10 are present in all FDTD
simulations of the bore-sight gain in this study as well as measured gain results. In Fig. 10, a sequence of gain curves is shown
for various dielectric constants with
79 ,
0.12 m,
2.5 mm.
and
Ripples in the frequency domain are often the result of an
echo in the time domain, as noted in Section V-A. Here, the
and a deradiated field takes the form of some initial pulse
. This gives a Fourier transform
layed scattered pulse
of the form
. The magnitude of this function shows a periodic ripple on top of the original response with
. In Fig. 10, all three
a period in the frequency domain of
plotted gain functions show a ripple with a period of approximately 2.2 GHz which corresponds to a time delay of 0.45 ns.
The fact that each of the gain curves shows the same ripple period makes it unlikely that the secondary radiation is the result
of the traveling wave in the spiral, since the phase velocity of
the traveling wave is a stronger function of the dielectric than
the shown variation in the period.
Instead, it would appear that the initial pulse is radiated into
free space and the second pulse is the result of some scattering
13.5 cm. The
which occurs at a distance of
truncation of the spiral occurs 12 cm from the feed, and after
running a number of simulations with various radii for the spirals, it became apparent that the time delay which causes the
, where is the radius of
ripple tends to be approximately
the spiral. In order to verify that the ripple is related to the truncation of the spiral and to present more convincing support than
the theoretical gain model proposed previously, a large spiral
was modeled in FDTD so that the secondary ripple could be
seen separated from the initial radiated pulse. In Figs. 11 and
12, three spirals with differing dielectric constants and a radius
of 1.2 m are shown in the frequency domain and time domain.
The time-domain plots in Fig. 12 show an initial radiation
with a peak around 0 ns and a secondary radiation with a peak
around 4 ns. The delay is the expected transit time for a spiral
of this size. With the two pulses separated, the effect of the secondary radiation can be removed by time gating. This is seen
in Fig. 11 as the dotted line. It should be noted that both peaks
in the time plot show a chirping property with high frequencies being radiated earlier than low frequencies. This is most
case. The fact that this chirping apeasily seen in the
pears in both pulses suggests that the delayed pulse is a scattering from the radiation in the active region. If the initial pulse
Fig. 11. Simulated gain for three 1.2-m radius spirals (top to bottom):
6, 11. Time gated gain is shown dotted.
= 1,
Fig. 12. Time domain response for 1.2-m radius spirals (top to bottom):
refers to the distance from the center of the spiral to an
1, 6, 11. Here, r
observer in the far field.
were radiated at the feed point then the scattered pulse would
be a delayed version of the excitation (a differentiated Gaussian
pulse, in this case). Instead, each frequency is believed to be ra. The signal travels
diated at its active region where
to the outer radius and scatters as depicted in Fig. 13. Since the
time delay between the two pulses is
, the radiated field takes the form
(12)
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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ANTENNAS AND PROPAGATION, VOL. 55, NO. 11, NOVEMBER 2007
Fig. 14. Radiation patterns for the upper and lower gain curves at the respective
minima and maxima denoted in Fig. 10 by dotted vertical lines.
MCFADDEN AND SCOTT: ANALYSIS OF THE EQUIANGULAR SPIRAL ANTENNA ON A DIELECTRIC SUBSTRATE
in this study are for the free-space case, the spiral antenna is
typically operated in an absorbing can and preliminary simulations show the impedance graph in Fig. 9 may still be applicable. Some features seen in this study may be specific to the
particular method of feeding the antenna with a bowtie and perhaps additional work could show how these effects are changed
by different feed methods. In addition, the gain ripple presented
in Section VI can be altered by using different types of outer
truncations and future work could explore this further as well
as determine the effect of the can on the gain ripple observed in
the bore-sight gain section.
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