A Low-Cost Partially Reflective Surface for Gain Enhancement of Dual Polarized Microstrip Patch Antenna

This paper presents a designed partially reflective surface (PRS) with a low-cost substrate for gain enhancement in the dual-polarized antenna. The conventional microstrip patch antenna, with the operating frequency at 3.5 GHz, is selected to use for a source. Two SMA ports with a 90-degree difference phase are fed into the patch antenna to create a dual-polarization. The PRS is designed based on the unit cell of a square metallic patch. The dimension of the unit cell is 5 mm × 5 mm. To investigate the performance of the PRS design, the fully 3D-simulation software, CST-Studio, is used to monitor all parameters, e.g., reflection magnitude, reflection phase, and realized gain. Four conditions on the square patch are carefully chosen by varying the dimension of the square patch from 3 mm to 4.5 mm with a step of 0.5 mm. Based on simulated results, the maximum gain at the zero degrees is increased from 1.68 dBi to 5.82 dBi, when compared with and without an integrated partially reflective surface.