Design and Analysis of Fractal-Shaped High-Impedance Surface Unit Cell Characteristics

Abstract

Fractal geometries consistently provide solutions to several electromagnetic design problems. In this paper, fractal geometries such as Hilbert and Moore curves are used to design efficient High-Impedance Surfaces. Modern communication devices have many sensors that are needed to communicate wirelessly. The critical component of wireless communications is antennas. Planar microstrip patch antennas are popular due to their low profile, compactness, and good radiation characteristics. The structural disadvantages of microstrip antennas are that they have surface waves that propagate over the ground plane. High-Impedance Surface (HIS) planes are a prominent solution to minimize and eliminate surface waves. The HIS structures behave as active LC filters that suppress surface waves at their resonance frequency. The resonance frequency of the structure is obtained by its LC equivalent or by analyzing the reflection phase characteristics. This work presents conventional HIS structures similar to mushroom HIS and fractal HIS such as Hilbert curve and Moore curve HIS. The HIS reflection phase characteristics are obtained by applying periodic boundary conditions with plane wave illumination. The results were obtained in terms of the reflection phase angle. The conventional mushroom structures show narrow band characteristics at given dimensions of 10 mm × 10 mm and 20 mm × 20 mm. These structures are helpful in the replacement of PEC ground planes for patch antennas under sub-6 GHz. The Hilbert and Moore fractals are also designed and have a multiband response that can be useful for L, S, and C band applications. Another design challenge of HIS is protrusions, which make design difficult. The work also presents the effect of having vias and the absence of vias on reflection phase characteristics. The response shows the least and no significant effect of vias under the x-band operation.