A Reconfigurable Microstrip Patch Antenna With Switchable Liquid-Metal Ground Plane

Abstract

This paper presents a novel reconfigurable microstrip patch antenna that is reconfigured using liquid metal. The proposed antenna employs two approaches in unison to switch the direction of the main beam. Specifically, the antenna uses the parasitic steering approach together with a novel switchable ground plane. The antenna operates at 5.9 GHz. It consists of a driven patch surrounded by four parasitics. All five elements are circular disk resonators. Each of the parasitic resonators incorporate a drill hole. The drill holes can be filled or emptied of liquid metal to control the behavior of the parasitics. The ground plane incorporates two reconfigurable segments. The switchable ground plane can be reshaped by adding or removing the additional segments of ground plane which are formed from liquid metal. To the best of the authors' knowledge, this is the first antenna that is capable of reconfiguring its radiation pattern by reshaping the ground plane using liquid metal. A hardware prototype of the antenna was fabricated and measured. The measurement results show that the antenna can switch between five different beam directions, namely: 0, ±20, and ±40. The design has only 0.5 dB of scan loss across the beam switching range.

Design and Optimization of Microstrip Patch Antennas for Wireless Communication Systems– A Literature Review

“…Moreover, rectangular microstrip patch antenna arrays, ranging from single elements to configurations like (1×2), (2×2), and (1×4) arrays, can exhibit distinct operating modes like TM10, TM01, and TM11 [7]. Additionally, reconfigurable microstrip patch antennas can employ liquid metal for altering the main beam direction, facilitating multiple beam orientations such as 0°, ±20°, and ±40° [17]. These diverse operational modes offer adaptability and versatility in enhancing the performance of microstrip patch antennas across a breadth of frequency bands and applications.…”

A simply accessed approach of 2D‐shaping liquid metal in microwave device applications

“…This is because 2D-shaping LM within those devices needs highly sophisticated procedures, for instance, chemical molding, imprinting, screen printing, laser patterning, and 3D printing, [6][7][8][9][10][11] which need to be proceeded with the aid of bulky instruments. Furthermore, in LM-based reconfigurable microwave devices, LM has mainly been used to alter the length of a wire or act as a switch, [12][13][14][15] where high removability of LM was admitted. Nevertheless, LM-based reconfigurable devices were seldom reported incorporating 2D-shaped LM.…”