Meandered UC-EBG structure for a reduction of the mutual coupling in a patch antenna array

Abstract

A meandered uniplanar compact electromagnetic band-gap structure is proposed. Meandered microstrip lines between adjacent cells are used to increase the equivalent inductance. As a result, the dimension of the proposed EBG structure is more compact and its frequency band-gap is wider than that of the conventional uniplanar EBG structure. Two patch arrays with and without an EBG structure were designed, fabricated, and tested to validate the performance of the proposed EBG structure. The measured results demonstrated that a mutual coupling reduction of 4dB is achievable in a patch array with the proposed EBG structure.