SPACES-2015, Dept of ECE, KL UNIVERSITY

Corrugated Antipodal Vivaldi Antenna using Spiral

Shape Negative Index Metamaterial for Ultra-
Wideband Application

Rahul Singha Dr. D Vakula

Electronics and Communication Engineering Electronics and Communication Engineering
National Institute of Technology, Warangal National Institute of Technology, Warangal
Warangal, India Warangal, India
naoremrahul5488@hotmail.com vakula@nitw.ac.in

Abstract This paper describes a corrugated antipodal et al. [6] introduced single and multilayered inhomogeneous
vivaldi antenna with improved performance by using negative and anisotropic zero-index metamaterials (ZIM) into Vivaldi
index metamaterial (NIM) of the Archimedean spiral design. A antenna in an effort to enhance its directivity and gain. The
single layer NIM piece is placed perpendicular middle of the two disadvantage of the ZIM is narrow bandwidth due to which
arm of the proposed antenna. The antenna size is 30600.787 the directivity and gain have some limitation.
mm3 operating at 8GHz. The simulated results of NIM
corrugated antipodal vivaldi antenna show that the gain and
directivity has increased up to 1.2dB and 1dB respectively. The
HPBW is increased by 90 with the reflection coecient less than
10 dB from 4.7 GHz to 11 GHz for UWB application.

KeywordsNegative index metamaterial (NIM), Ultra

wideband (UWB), Half power beam width (HPBW)

I. INTRODUCTION
Vivaldi antenna was first invented by Gibson in 1979. The
vivaldi antenna has applications in many fields, such as
imaging system, radar, satellite communication, see-through-
well (STW), phase array system and UWB system. Vivaldi
antenna has broadband characteristics and excellent properties
such as symmetrical structure, light weight and high
efficiency. Moreover it can be easily fabricated in printed Fig.1 The geometry of the designed antenna
circuit board (PCB) and can be easily integrated with
electronics systems. In this paper, the incorporation of NIM into a CAVA is
Mathematically, Vivaldi antenna has infinite bandwidth [1] done aiming to increase its directivity, gain and HPBW, in
and generally the bandwidth is proportional to its length and addition to minimizing the size and cost. Here, archimedean
aperture. Consequently, the size of the antenna increases when spiral structure is used on the substrate to obtain negative
augmentation of UWB performance is required. The main index metamaterial (NIM). Using spiral-NIM in corrugated
challenges in design of Vivaldi antenna are to increase gain, antipodal vivaldi antenna (CAVA) the gain and directivity is
directivity and obtain stable radiation pattern. increased besides the half power beam width is also increased.
Generally, the directivity of the vivaldi antenna is II. DESIGN OF CORRUGATED ANTIPODAL VIVALDI ANTENNA
relatively low and gain depends on the size of the antenna. For
The CAVA antenna structure and dimensions are
compact size UWB vivaldi antenna, it is very difficult to get
illustrated in Fig. 1. The exponential tapered slot line is used
good result. Recently, using photonic band gap (PBG)
for the patch and the ground plane of the proposed antenna
substrate [2], the vivaldi antenna array have been proposed.
[1]. The unequal rectangular slots are cut the edge of the
But due to its large size, fabrication is very complicated.
antenna which is helping to improve the performance of the
A technique is introduced to improve the antipodal vivladi antenna. For maximum power transfer to the antenna 50
antenna (AVA) directivity by inserting a director into the microstrip line is used. According to the antenna structure the
aperture [3] or applying elongation technique to the antenna x-y plane is an E - plane and z-x plane is an H - plane. The
substrate beyond its aperture [4]. Zhou and Cui [5] and Zhou corrugated AVA is designed on the roger RT/duroid 5880 (r

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= 2.2 and tan = 0.0009) substrate with a thickness of 0.787

mm at operating frequency 6.8 GHz.

TABLE I
DIMENSIONS FOR THE ANTENNA

Parameters Dimensions
(mm)
L 60
W 30
W1 5
W2 20
W3 5
t 2
(a)

III. THE CAVA INCORPORATED WITH NIM

A. Structure of Negative Index Metamaterial
Fig. 2 shows a unit cell of NIM structure. It is constructed
of two self complementary archimedean spiral shapes over
substrate. The NIM unit cell with dimensions of 55 mm2
(AB) is designed on an identical substrate material used for
the CAVA design. The NIM is excited with an electric field
along the y-direction and a magnetic field along x-direction as
illustrated in fig. 3. The resonant frequency of NIM cell is
controlled by the gap between spirals [9].

(b)

Fig. 2 Unit cell NIM

(c)
Fig. 4 Effective parameters and imaginary parts, (a) Refractive index, (b)
Permittivity (), (c) Permeability ().

Effective constitutive workable parameters of the substrate are

obtained via Retrieval algorithm described in [7, 8], and the
results are shown in fig 4. The real part of the permeability ()
is negative over two frequency bands 4.3 4.7 GHz and 8.4
9.2 GHz as shown in fig. 4 (a). The real effective
permittivity ( ) is also negative over a three band from 3
4.3 GHz, 4.6 8.4 GHz and 9.4 12 GHz. The effective
permittivity () and permeability () is simultaneously
Fig. 3 NIM configuration negative within a narrow band at 4.6 4.7GHz and therefore,
the metamaterial unit cell structure exhibits one left-handed

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pass bands. The values of refractive index (n) are negative at 3 gain and directivity of CAVA with single layer NIM is 1.2dB
5 GHz, 7.8 9.6 GHz. and 1dB respectively.
B. NIM Incorporated with CAVA
The final structure of the corrugated AVA which is
incorporated with single layer NIM piece is shown in fig. 5.
Different techniques are available for incorporating NIM into
CAVA. Here, single layer of NIM is inserted perpendicularly
to the substrate i.e. between the two arms of the antenna.
IV. SIMULATION RESULT AND DISCUSSION
After The performance of the CAVA both with and
without NIM is verified using HFSS (high frequency
structural simulator) 15 software. The overall results show that
the antenna with NIM performs better than the one without
NIM, but the return loss is shifted from 2 to 4.7GHz below
10dB.
Fig. 7 Simulated gain of the CAVA with and without NIM

Fig. 8 Simulated Directivity of the CAVA with and without NIM

The plots of E- and H-plane radiation patterns for both

Fig. 5 The proposed CAVA incorporated with NIM.
CAVA, single layer NIM CAVA at 6 GHz, 8 GHz and 10
GHz are shown in fig. 9 & 10. As revealed by the results, the
single layer NIM CAVA shows enhanced performance of
directivity than the antenna without NIM. All the antennas
exhibit symmetrical radiation patterns in both the E and H-
planes. The HPBW of the CAVA with NIM increases about
90, compared to the CAVA without NIM.

Fig. 6 Simulated return loss of the CAVA with and without NIM

As shown in fig. 7 and fig. 8, the gain and directivity of the

antenna have been increased by using NIM in the frequency
band from 4.6 8.4GHz, 9.4 12GHz. The improvement in

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(a) (a)

(b)
(b)

(c)
(c)
Fig. 10 Comparison for simulated H-plane (z-x) radiation at: (a) 6GHz, (b)
Fig. 9 Comparison for simulated E-plane (x-y) radiation patterns at: (a) 8GHz, (c) 10GHz.
6GHz, (b) 8GHz, (c) 10GHz.
V. CONCLUSION
In this paper, a single layer NIM is incorporated to the
corrugated antipodal Vivaldi antenna to enhance the overall
performance of the antipodal Vivaldi antenna. The simulation
result showing the NIM CAVA has enhanced gain and
directivity. The HPBW also increases and radiation patterns in
E-and H-planes are symmetrical.
REFERENCES
[1] Gibson, P. J., The Vivaldi aerial," 9th European Microwave
Conference, pp. 101-105, 1979.
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1160, 1996.
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Vivaldi antenna with dielectric director for near-field microwave
imaging," IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagations, vol. 58, no.
7, pp. 2318-2326, Jul. 2010.

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[4] Kota, K. and L. Shafai, Gain and radiation pattern enhancement of

balanced antipodal Vivaldi antenna," Electronics Letters, vol. 47, no. 5,
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