4 IEEE ANTENNAS AND WIRELESS PROPAGATION LETTERS, VOL.

14, 2015

RCS Reduction of a Patch Array Antenna

Based on Microstrip Resonators
Ying Liu, Member, IEEE, Hui Wang, Kun Li, and Shuxi Gong

Abstract—Microstrip resonators are used for reducing the antenna is generally degraded. The complementary split-ring
in-band monostatic radar cross section (RCS) of a patch array resonators (CSRRs) were used to reduce the in-band RCS in
antenna. The reference patch array antenna works at 4.5 GHz, dual-frequency band [6]. The CSRR is actually a bandpass
and the proposed antenna with microstrip resonators is designed
frequency selective surfaces (FSS), which is periodically
at the same frequency. The resonant frequency of the microstrip
resonators is also 4.5 GHz so that it can cover the operating band printed on the ground plane. Moreover, the design of CSRR is
of the patch array antenna. Compared to the reference antenna, complicated. Loading radar absorbing materials on the antenna
which does not have the microstrip resonators, the simulation is another essential technique, which can reduce the RCS by
results demonstrate that the monostatic RCS of the proposed converting the scattered energy into heat [7]–[11]. However,
array antenna can be reduced at least 10 dB for both phi- and RAM is usually a feasible choice for out-band RCS reduction
theta-polarized incident waves while preserving the desired radi- in order to alleviate the negative influence on the radiation
ation characteristics. Measurements on realized prototypes show
performance. Furthermore, RAM increases the complexity of
good agreement with the simulations and prove the reliability and
superior performance of the proposed approach. design and manufacturing. An ultra-thin metamaterial absorber
was applied to reduce the in-band RCS of a waveguide slot
Index Terms—Microstrip resonators, patch array antenna, antenna [12], and the performance of the antenna was simul-
radar cross section reduction (RCSR).
taneously preserved. However, a large ground plane, which
is about at the operating frequency, is needed to
I. INTRODUCTION position the absorber. Another similar absorber is presented to

W ITH the development of stealth technology, radar cross reduce the in-band RCS of patch antenna [13] without deteri-
section reduction (RCSR) has become a popular topic orating the radiation characteristics. However, it has the same
in recent years. As a special scatterer, antenna signature con- drawback as that proposed in [12]. Passive cancellation, based
tributes significantly to the RCS of a low observable platform, on the high impedance characteristics of the mushroom-like
such as stealth airborne vehicles and ships, so RCSR for an- electromagnetic band-gap structures, is also used to reduce the
tenna is a practical and urgent matter. Microstrip patch antenna RCS of patch array antenna in [14].
is widely used in the military and civil fields because of its In this letter, microstrip resonators are designed to reduce the
low profile, light weight, compact structure, and easy fabrica- in-band RCS of the patch array antenna. The simulation results
tion. However, the patch antenna has such a large monostatic prove that the monostatic RCS of the array antenna can be re-
RCS that it is easy to be detected. Therefore, the RCSR for the duced significantly for both phi- and theta-polarized incident
patch antenna is urgent for a low RCS carrier. Over the past few waves. In order to validate the design strategies, prototypes of
decades, many solutions for antenna RCSR have been proposed, the reference and proposed antennas were fabricated. The mea-
such as target shaping, radar absorbing materials (RAMs), and sured results show that the radiation performance of the antenna
passive and active cancellations [1]. The shaping of the antenna does not degrade significantly. This letter is organized as fol-
surfaces is usually used to reduce the RCS by deflecting the scat- lows. A theoretical analysis of RCS and microstrip resonators
tered energy away from the detecting direction (as in radome is briefly presented in Section II. In Section III, the reference
technology) [2], [3] or reducing scattering area [4], [5]. antenna and proposed antenna are designed. The simulated and
Although these methods are obvious for RCSR within a measured results in terms of radiation characteristics and the
narrow or wide band, the process of design and analysis is achieved RCSR are discussed in Section IV.
complicated. In addition, the radiation characteristic of the
II. THEORETICAL ANALYSIS
The total RCS of an antenna is determined in terms of an-
Manuscript received July 20, 2014; revised August 25, 2014; accepted tenna mode component and structural mode component. The
August 27, 2014. Date of publication September 04, 2014; date of current
version January 27, 2015. This work was supported by the Program for total RCS of an antenna is defined as [1], [9].
New Century Excellent Talents in University under Grant NCET-11-0690,
the Fundamental Research funds for the Central Universities under Grant (1)
K5051202049, and the National Natural Science Foundation of China under
Grant No. 61372001. where is the total RCS of antenna, and are associated
The authors are with the National Key Laboratory of Antennas and with the structural mode and the antenna mode scattering, re-
Microwave Technology, Xidian University, Xi’an 710071, China (e-mail: spectively, is the antenna reflection coefficient due to the
[email protected]).
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this letter are available online
mismatched load, and is the relative phase between the two
at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org. components. Equation (1) shows that RCSR can be achieved
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/LAWP.2014.2354341 by reducing the antenna mode ( ) or the structural mode ( ).

1536-1225 © 2014 IEEE. Personal use is permitted, but republication/redistribution requires IEEE permission.
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LIU et al.: RCS REDUCTION OF PATCH ARRAY ANTENNA 5

Fig. 2. Comparison of the -parameters for different cases [referring to

Fig. 1. Top view of (a) the reference antenna and (b) the proposed antenna.
Fig. 1(b), Case 1 includes resonators No. 1 and 2, case 2 includes resonators
, , , , , , , ,
No. 1–3, and case 3 includes resonators No. 1–5].
, and (unit: millimeters).

However, it is difficult to reduce antenna mode for a certain an-

tenna. RCSR for antennas mainly focuses on the reduction of
structural mode, which is the approach followed in this letter.
Microstrip resonators are widely used as filters in microwave
circuits. Square and rectangular microstrip resonators are pop-
ular because of their simple structure and outstanding perfor-
mance. These microstrip resonators, fed as radiators, are the
so-called microstrip resonator antenna [15]. Therefore, the de-
sign of microstrip resonators can benefit from the theory of mi-
crostrip antennas. A simple and very useful theory based on
the resonant cavity model is developed to explain and predict
the behavior of microstrip antennas [15]–[17]. According to the
cavity model, the resonant frequency is given by the following
equation:

(2)

where is the speed of light in vacuum, and are the length

and width, respectively, and is the relative dielectric constant.

III. DESIGN OF REFERENCE AND PROPOSED ANTENNAS

The reference patch array antenna has a central frequency of
4.5 GHz. The antenna is printed on a square substrate of FR4
with a thickness of 1.5 mm and relative dielectric constant of
4.4. The reference antenna with metallic ground is shown in
Fig. 1(a).
In order to verify that the microstrip resonators can reduce
the in-band RCS of the patch array antenna, the proposed an-
tenna is designed with the same size as the reference antenna. Fig. 3. Comparison of the radiation pattern for different cases. (a) .
The proposed antenna with five microstrip resonators is shown (b) .
in Fig. 1(b). Resonators No. 1, 2, and 3 have the same size while
No. 4 and 5 have another size. Both the antenna and the res- simulation, the size of the resonators stays the same. As is ap-
onators are designed to work in the mode. The dimen- parent from Figs. 2 and 3, including only resonators 1–3 has
sion can be determined from (2), and the optimized results are little influence on the -parameter and the radiation pattern of
given in Fig. 1. Compared to the works cited above, this design the array antenna, whereas the configuration with five resonators
has the advantage of simple structures and easy fabrication. (case 3) encounters a larger frequency shift and suffers from a
poor radiation patterns in both E- and H-planes. The simula-
IV. PERFORMANCE ANALYSIS OF THE PROPOSED ANTENNA tion results indicate that resonators No. 4 and 5 degrade the ra-
diation performance of the array antenna. In order to alleviate
A. Radiation Performance the impact on the radiation characteristic, the size of resonators
In this section, the radiation characteristics and RCS of the No. 4 and 5 was adjusted to be slightly smaller than the other res-
proposed antenna are analyzed in detail. To study the radia- onators. Final dimensions are shown in Fig. 1. To verify the de-
tion characteristics of the proposed antenna, three groups of res- sign strategy, prototypes of the reference and proposed antennas
onators with different numbers are added to the ground. The were fabricated, and the radiation performance was measured.
corresponding simulation results are depicted in Fig. 2. During Photographs of the two antennas and the feeding network are
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6 IEEE ANTENNAS AND WIRELESS PROPAGATION LETTERS, VOL. 14, 2015

Fig. 4. Photographs of the two antennas and the feeding network.

Fig. 5. Comparison of -parameters for simulated and measured cases.

shown in Fig. 4. The feeding network is a four-way power di-

vider that is made of coaxial cable. The type of the divider we Fig. 6. Comparison of radiation patterns for the simulated and measured cases.
use in the testing process is “SP-TX-4B.” (a) . (b) .
As shown in Fig. 5, both the simulated and measured reflec-
tion coefficients are in good agreement for both the reference
and proposed antennas. Compared to the simulated results, the
measured resonant frequency of each antenna is shifted slightly
higher. Considering the manufacturing and test errors, the mea-
sured result is reasonable.
A comparison of the radiation patterns of the reference and
proposed antennas is shown in Fig. 6 for the E-plane ( )
and H-plane ( ), respectively. The measured boresight
gain decreases slightly in comparison to the simulated values for
both E- and H-planes. Moreover, Fig. 6 shows that the array an-
tenna with resonators has distorted radiation patterns. However,
the amount of deformation is acceptable, and the RCSR for an- Fig. 7. Comparison of the RCS reduction for different dielectric losses.
tennas is a tradeoff between radiation performance and a low
RCS characteristic.

B. Radar Cross Section Reduction

The resonators can reduce the in-band RCS based on the prin-
ciple of passive cancellation. In order to validate this technique,
the RCSs of the reference and proposed antennas are given. The
relation between the RCS reduction and dielectric loss is pre-
sented in Fig. 7. It is shown that dielectric loss has little influ-
ence on the RCS reduction. In Fig. 8, the frequency response of
the monostatic RCS of the reference and proposed antennas are
plotted for a normally incident phi-polarized plane wave. It is
Fig. 8. Comparison between the monostatic RCS of the reference and proposed
shown that the in-band RCS can be reduced noticeably in dif- antennas for a phi-polarized wave incident in different directions.
ferent directions. Compared to the reference antenna, the RCS
of the proposed antenna can be reduced as much as 17.5 dB in
the operating band. wave. Fig. 9 shows that the current distribution on the micristrip
Referring to Fig. 9, it is observed that the mode is resonators and the ground plane are in the opposite direction,
excited in the resonators for the normally incident phi-polarized which indicates a 180 reflection phase difference between
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LIU et al.: RCS REDUCTION OF PATCH ARRAY ANTENNA 7

directions where the RCS of the proposed antenna is larger than

that of the reference antenna. Therefore, the RCS of the pro-
posed antenna rises with the increase of theta, and even exceeds
the reference antenna after reaching a certain angle. In addition,
the resonators cannot work in the or modes when
the angle reaches a certain level. Accordingly, the condition of
scattering cancellation is not satisfied, and the RCS of the pro-
posed antenna will get large.

Fig. 9. Current distribution on the surfaces of (left) the resonators and

V. CONCLUSION
(right) the ground plane for a normally incident phi-polarized wave. Microstrip resonators are used to reduce the in-band RCS of a
patch array antenna while preserving the radiation performance.
This technique has the advantages of simple structure, easy anal-
ysis, and convenient fabrication. Furthermore, this technique
can be applied to reduce the RCS of patch array antennas for
both phi- and theta-polarized incident waves. The simulation
results demonstrate that this technique is effective, and the mea-
surements of the prototypes confirm the validity of the design
strategy.

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