Oct. 13: Student Presentation Series with Justin Kasemodel

ESL Student Presentation Series:

Wideband Conformal Array with Integrated Feed and Matching Network for Wide-Angle Scanning

• Speaker: Justin Kasemodel, Doctoral Student & Graduate Research Associate
• When: Tuesday, October 13, 2009, from 12:30-1:30 p.m.
• Where: ESL Classroom, Room 258, ElectroScience Laboratory

As part of the ESL Student Presentation Series, Justin Kasemodel will be giving a presentation about his work on Tuesday, October 13.  All ESL students are welcome, and new students are especially encouraged to attend. As always, pizza and pop will be served.

Abstract:

It is traditionally known that wideband apertures lose bandwidth when placed over a ground plane. This presentation introduces a new non-symmetric element for wideband tightly coupled dipole arrays to overcome this problem. The proposed element with additional degrees of freedom allow cancelation of the ground plane inductance to achieve wider bandwidths in conformal settings. Specifically, each arm on the dipole is different than the other (or non-symmetric), enabling better independent control of inductance and capacitance. Specifically, the arms are identical near the center feed portion but dissimilar towards the ends, forming a ball-and-cup. It is demonstrated that the non-symmetric qualities achieve wideband performance. A design example for conformal installation with balun and matching network is developed to cover X-band. To avoid extraneous radiation and maintain low-profile, the feed is printed on the ground plane transitioning to vertical twin-wire leads connected to the array aperture. The designed array (with intergraded feed) and matching network is placed 1/7l (at 7.5GHz) above a ground plane and shown to maintain a VSWR <2.5 from 7.5-13GHz while scanning up to 75° and 60° in E and H-plane, respectively.