Robust Wearable UHF Antennas for Security Applications

Wearable electronics are occupying an increasing portion of our daily activities. The span of wearable applications extends from purely medical, over different security services to various sports and fashion devices. Antennas play one of the most important roles in wearable networks as they have a key contribution to the overall efficiency of a wearable wireless link. This work focuses on the design and practical realization of robust wearable antennas intended for voice communication inside the Ultra High Frequency (UHF) band. The proposed antennas are mainly envisioned for security services such as military, police or rescue services. To this aim, several questions have been addressed while analyzing and designing the proposed antennas. The on-body environment significantly affects the characteristics of an antenna. The coupling between the antenna and the host body influences both the antenna and the body characteristics. On one hand, the complex lossy nature of the hosting body tends to deteriorate the radiation performances of the wearable antenna, while on the other hand, the radiation from the antenna can cause an increase of the temperature of the wearerâs body (localy and/or of the entire body). The wearability aspect also requires that the size and the profile of the antenna are appropriate so that it can be easily integrated into the wearerâs garment. The size of the wearable antennas becomes more critical at lower frequencies (for instance UHF), where the wavelengths become comparable with the size of the body, thus adding an additional limitation while selecting the type of the antenna. A Planar Inverted F Antenna (PIFA) was selected as an appropriate antenna candidate addressing the introduced specifications. In parallel with the antenna prototype, a suitable technology, combining flexible conductors and stretchable substrates, has been proposed. The suggested technology also enables an adjustment of the electric properties of the designated substrate materials. Several antenna prototypes were successfully designed, fabricated and characterized. Finally, a set of tests in realistic everyday conditions were performed, thus validating the performance of the proposed antenna concepts along with the proposed technology and assessing their potential of being used for commercial purposes. We believe that the obtained results provide useful guidelines for future design of robust flexible wearable antennas.

Optimization of an acoustic leaky-wave antenna based on acoustic metamaterial

Sami Driss Karkar, Hervé Lissek, Seyyed Hussein Seyyed Esfahlani

In recent years, an increasing number of pioneering studies have been carried out in the field of acoustic metamaterials, following the path of electromagnetic metamaterials. These artificial engineered materials are designed in such a way so as to achieve new macroscopic properties, like negative refraction, that are not readily present in nature. While the design and the fabrication of these artificial materials is a hot topic among scientists in different fields of physics such as photonic, electromagnetic, acoustic and recently mechanic, an important part of the scientific research is now oriented towards the identification of actual applications for these structures. As the novel idea of metamaterial was first developed in the electromagnetic realm and for the microwave frequency range, it is somehow more mature in these fields than in acoustics. Metamaterial applications are now widely developed in electromagnetics especially for the design of new antenna. Among other examples, metamaterial concepts are aiming at reducing the coupling between two adjacent radiating elements of the array and increasing the operating bandwidth of radiating elements. It is also used for phase compensation in microwave transistors, and many more applications are rising in the recent literature. In year 2009, in analogy with electromagnetic transmission line metamaterial, our group proposed a concept of acoustic transmission line metamaterial, consisting of a waveguide periodically loaded with membranes along the duct, and transverse open channels (denoted “stubs”). Based on our proposed structure and in analogy with applications of transmission line electromagnetic metamaterials, researchers proposed the idea of an acoustic counterpart to the “backward wave antenna”. These antennas or radiating devices have a very special property such that the radiation angle or the directivity changes with the frequency. In this article, a comprehensive, step by step, design methodology for acoustic backward wave antenna is presented. For this purpose we use the model proposed in our 2009 publication for acoustic transmission line metamaterial, but we focus the discussion on the optimization of the antenna performance. We also propose some closed form formulas for the practical design of such devices, and a formal validation of the structure is proposed using Comsol Multiphysics.

2013

Antennas for CubeSat Communication

Miroslav Veljovic

CubeSats are a type of small satellites (< 500 kg) that weigh several kilograms and consist of multiple Units (U) measuring 100 × 100 × 113.5 mm3. CubeSats emerged as a low-cost alternative to conventional large satellites, and have since demonstrated capabilities for communication, Earth observation, technology demonstration and many other. The primary goal of CubeSats, as it is the case with any miniaturized satellite, is to reduce the cost of orbital deployment. CubeSats are commonly launched as a secondary payload on large launch vehicles. One or several satellites are placed in a dedicated deployment system, which typically accommodates three CubeSat Units. The deployment system strictly limits the dimensions of any features on the CubeSat surface. CubeSat antennas perform the same functions as antennas on conventional satellites, such as telemetry and command, communication, navigation or inter-satellite links (ISL). However, most traditional antennas for small satellites are not suitable for CubeSats due to the profile constraints of the deployment system. Two approaches for antenna design are generally adopted. In the first, one or several low-profile antennas are placed on the CubeSat exterior. In the second, deployable antenna structures are used if the CubeSat platform does not offer sufficient dimensions. At low frequencies, the additional space is required to achieve a good radiation efficiency, whereas at high frequencies an increased antenna aperture provides a high gain. This thesis describes several antenna geometries, both low-profile and deployable, which enable several communication aspects of an Internet-of-Things (IoT) constellation of 3U CubeSats in the Low Earth Orbit (LEO). The main novelty of the proposed solutions is in their electromagnetic performance, as opposed to most CubeSat antenna designs where the mechanical design is the main achievement. The presented antennas succeed to exhibit a wide bandwidth or a specified radiation under strict size constraints. The thesis presents several wideband aperture-coupled patch antennas for TT&C and data downlink in S and X bands. A thoroughly investigated shielded-stripline feeding structure enables a wideband circular polarization (CP) with a unidirectional radiation, and demonstrates capabilities such as interference suppression of adjacent frequencies and efficient CubeSat integration. Patch-antenna arrays in L band are then presented, which radiate several independent beams for the capacity increase of an IoT machine-to-machine (M2M) communication system. The high permittivity of the antenna substrates lead to a strong coupling to the 3U CubeSat structure, emphasizing the importance of the antenna placement. Finally, different configurations of high-gain fixed-beam reflectarrays (RA) and transmitarrays (TA) are for the first time proposed for CubeSat ISL LEO communications in K band. Two novel unit cells are presented for RA and TA antennas, based on coupled loops and aperture-coupled patches, respectively. An axially corrugated CP horn antenna is designed as the feeding element for the arrays. A prototype of this antenna is fabricated using additive manufacturing in aluminum. The performance of all antennas, presented in this thesis, is validated by agreements between the calculation and 3D-simulation results and the VNA and anechoic-chamber measurements of several prototypes.

EPFL2020

3D analysis and optimization of microwave circuits by the method of moments

Francisco Jesus Nunez

The design and minaturization of microwave circuits involves the analysis and optimization of a large varity of structures, which, in general, are based on arbritrary objects embedded in also arbritary media. The most common situation is found when optimizing terminal antennas, whose main constraint is the antenna's volume, which must be fitted into a specified space, which in general is the phone or laptop case. This kind of antennas can also include stratified media, oblique metallizations, dielectric objects, waveguide components, in their definition making their analysis more difficult from the numeric point of view. The complete treatment of this kind of problems has been performed traditionally using Finite Differences or Finite Elements software, while it is more rare to find Method of Moments implementations for the solution of this kind of general problems. The Method of Moments has a certain number of advantages as the inclusion of radiation conditions or stratified media in the Green's function of the problem. Due to this it is possible to mesh only the surfaces or boundary conditions that are not included in the Green's function definition, obtaining, for instance, a more natural radiation boundary condition compared to other fullwave methods. The other big concern is the optimization of this kind of structures. In general the structures we are dealing with in this work can have very irregular shapes, in order to fit within the required volume constraints. The traditional optimizations techniques based on the gradient or conjugated gradient are not efficient when optimizing functions containning multiple minima and a large search space, which is the case in the optimization of terminal antennas. When miniaturizing terminal antennas or just a simple microstrip filter, the number of unknowns can be very large, and the different optimization variables can vary within wide limits in the search space. In this situation the Genetic Algorithms are ideal for seeking the global optimum solution of our problem. This work covers the analysis and optimization of microwave circuits, including antennas and filters in microstrip and waveguide technologies, paying more attention to the implementation of the Method of Moments (MoM) in conjugation with the Mixed Potential Integral Equation (MPIE) and Electric/Magnetic Field Integral Equation (EFIE/MFIE). The work has been split into 3 main goals: The analysis of 3 dimensional structures in stratified media, including arbritary shaped dielectric bodies using the Method of Moments, (MPIE,EFIE,MFIE). The analysis of shielded environments and more precisely the analysis of retangular waveguide cavities with the Method of Moments. The implementation of several optimization techniques, emcompassed in the frame of genetic algorithms, for the design and miniaturization of terminal antennas and microstrip filters. Some relevant examples linked to the efficiency and accuracy of the different methods and techiques explained in this work are included in each chapter, yielding to practical results suitable to be used in real life design problems. The main contributions of this work can be summarized as follows: In Chapter 2 we have developed the interpolation of 3D Green's function to the general solution of dielectric objects embedded in multilayered media. The interpolation method itself is preceeded by a spectral extraction of the quasi-static terms. This technique, very often applied in complex images techniques, has been applied to our specific Green's function problem yielding very good results in terms of accuracy and Green's function computation time. Another contribution, also emcompassed in Chapter 2, is the integration of the static part of the field dyadic G̿EM, performed by splitting the field dyadic into TM and TE components, allowing then an analytical integration of the dyadic terms in stratified media. In the frame of shielded environments in Chapter 3, the most important contribution is the extension of Ewald's acceleration technique to full electric and magnetic problems, allowing the acceleration of the field dyadic G̿EM and thus permit the extension of the MoM to the simulation of arbritary metallic shapes coupled to apertures through Ewald's approach. In Chapter 4 the most important contribution is the implementation of a Bayesian optimiser based on the estimation of probability made by dependencies trees. The dependency tree based method found in [1] and later in [2] has been adapted to the terminal antenna miniaturization yielding to excellent results in optimisation time and quality of the solution provided by the optimiser. Our implementation of the dependency tree method was found to be better than the traditional method used in this kind of problems. Chapter 4 contains also an implementation of the growing cells method presented in [3] for the specific problem of optimising pseudo periodic structures, like microwave filters, yielding to a powerful interpolating method which accelerates the optimisation process of microwaves devices whose fitness response is very time consuming.

EPFL2006