2012 Volume 2012 Pages 20120015
A patch antenna is a typical microstrip antenna composed of a dielectric block sandwiched between two thin metal plates, the metal patch and the ground plane. Although the shape of the metal patch critically determines antenna performance, the design of such shapes is often based on trial and error, and an effective method for obtaining optimized shapes is needed. Furthermore, as operating frequency increases, it becomes more difficult to numerically evaluate antenna performance, due to the skin effect, a phenomenon whereby the penetration of high frequency electric current into a metal surface decreases exponentially. In this paper, we construct a topology optimization method of metallic patch antennas that obtains high performance configurations. In this method, a transition boundary condition is implemented so that the skin effect can be treated as surface impedance. As a result, the proposed method can successfully optimize metal shapes that deliver high antenna performance.
