MULTIWAY X-BAND MICROWAVE POWER DIVIDERS FOR ANTENNA ARRAY APPLICATION

Abstract

For spreading or combining microwave signals, power dividers, combiners, and splitters are passive microwave components. Many microwave applications, including phased antenna arrays and power amplifiers, require multiway power dividers. Power dividers come in two different varieties: Wilkinson power dividers and filtering power dividers. Usually, numerous two-way Wilkinson dividers are connected to create pla nar multiway dividers. Designing multiway power dividers by connecting two-way power dividers is a frequent practise. This divider offers good phase and amplitude consistency between the output ports, as well as good impedance matching at all ports. The two-way dividers are connected using transmission cables. These transmission lines can be used to adjust the two-way dividers performance in addition to serving as a physical connection between them. Calculation shows that only when the electric lengths of the interconnecting transmission lines are multiple quarter-wavelengths do the dividers respond in a symmetrical manner about the centre frequency. An aperture coupled feeding technique based dual band high gain 4 × 4 microstrip antenna array has been presented here for X-band radar and satellite communication. The designed array consists of three layers which are corporate feed network, 2D array of radiating patches, and coupling apertures on the ground plane. The novelty of the work is the designing of a new asymmetric H-shaped slot for the aperture coupled antenna (ACA) element. The antenna resonates at dual frequencies at 8.45 and 11.15 GHz within the X-band, those are altered independently by varying the physical parameters of the ACA. The three layers of the array are printed on two Taconic TLY-5 dielectric materials, which are stacked over each other. The designed array is realized on overall size of 100 x100 x2.09 mm3 and having return loss bandwidth (BW) of 3.2 percent in both bands that covers frequencies 8.53 to 8.81 GHz and 10.8 to 11.15 GHz. The gain and efficiency of the array are 17.1 dBi and 90.7 percent in the lower band and 19.34 dBi and 94.1 percent in the higher band. The array exhibits considerable low cross-polarization of less than - 14.2 dB and less than - 36.2 dB at two operating frequencies. Design array achieves better gain, and high efficiency on a low profile size.The simulation results display low SLL and high co to Xpol isolation at two frequencies, establishing good radiation characteristics of the array.