Full wave analysis of arbitrarily shaped line-fed microstrip antennas using triangular finite-element method

A numerical method is developed to investigate arbitrarily-shaped line-fed microstrip antennas. The electric integral equation is solved by adopting the triangular shaped basis element and using the Galerkin procedure. In the integral equation, Sommerfeld-type full wave Green´s functions are used. To enhance the computational efficiency, the full wave discrete image technique is applied. To examine the method, comparison is made between numerical and experimental results which show excellent agreement. The experimental error is also discussed