Creating a Gain Improvement Technique for a Horn Antenna using a Metamaterial Structure Inserted with a Thin Dielectric Sheet

Abstract

This paper proposed a new technique for the metamaterial on the structure of the curved-woodpile Electromagnetic Band Gap (EBG) inserted with a dielectric slab for gain improvement in a conventional rectangular horn antenna. We described a method to enhance gain by transferring the electromagnetic fields from the aperture of a horn through the EBG structure. Furthermore, we present the design procedures for inserting a dielectric slab into two layers of the EBG structure for the reduction of distance between the horn and proposed EBG structure. Such a proposed technique not only has the advantage of decreasing the total length of the antenna system but also providing higher gain with a low profile structure. This idea has been verified by both simulation and experimental results. The fabricated antenna can achieve 23.9 dBi of gain or higher than the gain, which is obtained using a conventional rectangular horn antenna at around 7 dBi at an operating frequency of 10 GHz. It is apparent that a good qualitative agreement between the measurements and simulations was achieved.