Investigation of slanted slots

With the number of wireless devices and demand for information transmitted wirelessly dramatically increasing, being able to develop simple and reliable antennas with large bandwidths is becoming more important. The size of many of these wireless devices can also be small, introducing yet another challenge for antenna designers. Some common types of antennas currently used for such applications include various forms of microstrip antennas. This thesis, however, investigates using a slanted slot to meet these design constraints. In this study, it is shown that the bandwidth of a quarter-wave slot can be enhanced by placing the slot on a slant to the edge of a metallic patch rather than placing it orthogonally to the edge. The work reported in this thesis also shows that not only does the bandwidth for a slanted slot increase, but the behavior of the slot becomes more robust to changes in the size of the metallic plate containing the slot. This same effect is studied with the analogous trapezoidal half-wavelength slot; however, while these benefits are found to still exist for the trapezoidal slot, the bandwidth does not increase as much as for the slanted slot case. The results of this study were distilled into a design procedure and the procedure was evaluated by designing a slanted slot and comparing its measurements with the simulated results. In the end it was shown that slanted slots are able to achieve larger bandwidths while also being more reliable due to their resilience to changing size constraints, all while remaining simple and easy to manufacture.U of I OnlyAuthor requested U of Illinois access only (OA after 2yrs) in Vireo ETD syste