| Microstrip antennas are widely used in several different technological areas including communication and navigation systems, weapons systems, radars, and telemetry and tracking systems. The microstrip antennas' physical features and simplicity of construction make them especially suited for these many applications.Practical uses of microstrip antennas often involve mounting the antennas on curved surfaces such as aircraft and missile fuselages, satellite bodies, and various other non-planar shapes however, most of the research on these antennas has been devoted to their operation on flat mounting surfaces. Only a relatively few studies have been done of microstrip antennas on conformal surfaces.The purpose of this research is a study of thin microstrip antennas that are mounted on a truncated cylinder and truncated cone. Many physical objects on which microstrip antennas are used can be modeled by these two simple geometries. The finite size of the geometries is treated, whereas in the past, the effects of truncation of the structures were not included in a general way.This study deals with different methods of calculating the radiation patterns of a microstrip antenna on a truncated cone and cylinder. Discussed first are the cavity model for electrically thin microstrip antennas and how the model is used to simplify the radiation problem of the microstrip patch to that of finding the radiation of a magnetic point-source. Then discussions follow describing high-frequency methods for determining the radiation of a magnetic point-source using ray optics and the Uniform Theory of Diffraction (UTD). These methods are used to predict the radiation from linearly-polarized microstrip patches on a truncated cylinder and cone, and the results are compared to laboratory measurements. For comparison, an alternate solution using classical modal expansions is derived for the case of the truncated cone. |
