A sixteen-element dual band compact array antenna for ISM/Bluetooth/Zigbee/WiMAX/WiFi-2.4/5/6 GHz applications

A sixteen-element dual band microstrip array antenna with four branches has been presented in this paper. The dual band array antenna is suitable for ISM/Bluetooth/Zigbee/WiMAX/ WiFi-2.4/5/6 GHz applications. The antenna is made up of eight circular patch (r = 2 mm) elements and eight rectangular patch (1 × 8 mm) elements that are connected together to provide double band and create a suitable radiation performance with a wide bandwidth. Therefore, the array is a combination of heterogeneous elements. Initially, to justify the antenna performance that means for estimating antenna gain, directivity, E-field, H-field and system efficiency both time domain (TD) and frequency domain (FD) solvers of computer simulation technology (CST) are used. The area of the antenna is 40 × 40 × 0.79 mm(3). Rogers RT 5880 (lossy) is used as a substrate and metal (copper) is used as radiating layers. The estimated results attest the proposed array antenna work on dual band 2.20–3.18 GHz and 4.81–7.21 GHz with centre operating frequencies of 2.54 GHz and 5.64 GHz, respectively. It maintains return loss lower than -10 dB with a better gain and directivity over the both working bands. The key objective of using the array antenna is to get the improved gain compact array antenna as well as to get dual band so that it can be used in multiple applications in daily life. The performance of the proposed array antenna is validated by three professional 3D electromagnetic simulators: high-frequency structure simulator (HFSS), FEKO (a computational electromagnetics software) and CST.