Antenna Bandwidth Enhancement Using Metamaterial Structure

Microstrip patch antenna becomes very popular day by day because of its ease of analysis and fabrication, low cost, light weight, easy to feed and their attractive radiation characteristics. Although patch antenna has numerous advantages, it has also some drawbacks such as restricted bandwidth, low gain. In this paper, an attempt has been made to increase the bandwidth of Microstrip patch antenna using metamaterial structure. Metamaterials, also called left-handed materials (LHMs), are a class of composite materials artificially built to exhibit unusual properties not found in nature. Metamaterial exhibiting negative permittivity and negative permeability in certain frequency range or known as left-handed material (LHM). CST MWS and MATLAB Softwares are used for the simulation and design calculations of the microstrip antennas. The return loss, bandwidth, gain, radiation pattern are evaluated. Using CST MWS simulation software proposed antenna is designed/simulated and optimized. The antenna exhibits a bandwidth of 0.12792GHz and the same antenna exhibits a bandwidth of 0.13166GHz when made by using a metamaterial SRR structure at frequency of 3.4 GHz. The variation in the bandwidth is due to the metamaterial structure used.