Artificial impedance ground planes for low profile antenna applications

Recent interest in artificial impedance surfaces for low-profile antennas has led to extensive research with the goal of optimizing the ground plane's characteristics for a given antenna configuration and broadening the operational bandwidth, or alternatively creating a multi-band functionality. A method of determining the optimal reflection phase for a low-profile dipole antenna over an electromagnetic band gap (EBG) ground plane has been developed based on image theory and is presented with experimental and numerical validation. A new artificial impedance surface has also been developed, which is composed of an annular slot ring on a thin grounded dielectric. The main difference between the proposed ground plane and a conventional EBG is that the high impedance condition exists only in the vicinity of the slot and is therefore best suited for antennas with a current distribution that has a similar shape as the annular slot ring. It is shown that a loop antenna positioned closely over an annular slot loaded ground plane exhibits approximately the same gain as a loop antenna over a conventional EBG ground plane. The advantage of the new structure is its lack of periodicity, which significantly eases manufacturing. Additionally, it is shown that multiple concentric slot rings can be designed into the ground plane, which excites multiple resonances in low-profile wideband antennas. The result is a multi-band high impedance ground plane constructed using a simple arrangement of annular slots. Finally, a manufacturing technique is presented for the application of arbitrarily configured EBG antennas to handheld dual-sensor landmine detection systems. It is shown that creating an EBG antenna using very thin layers of metal will enable it to be used for ground penetrating radar (GPR) when it is co-located with a low frequency metal detector without compromising the operation of the metal detector. The potential benefit of such an antenna would be a lower profile sensor head with twice the efficiency as currently employed GPR antennas.