Design and simulation of high gain 2-element, 4-element and 16-element arrays of microstrip patch antenna for terahertz applications based on photonic crystals

In the past years, the study of microstrip patch antennas has made significant progress because of their miniature size, low cost, compatibility, and ease of manufacture compared to traditional antennas. In this study, different microstrip patch antenna array configurations including 2-element, 4-element and 16-element were studied and designed in the range of frequencies of 0.25-0.55 THz. This study aims to enhance the gain and the radiation properties of these proposed antenna array configurations using air cylinder holes photonic band gap (PBG) substrate instead of the homogeneous substrate. Simulation was conducted with the help of CST Microwave Studio software for the different substrates. To obtain better radiation properties, the proposed antenna arrays have around 0.35 THz resonant frequencies where there exists a low atmospheric attenuation window in the terahertz band. The outcomes demonstrated that the studied antenna arrays based on the photonic band gap substrate provided additional performance in terms of the return loss, bandwidth, gain, directivity and beamwidth compared to their corresponding conventional antenna arrays counterparts based on the homogeneous substrate. Among all designed antenna array configurations, the 16-element antenna array based on the photonic band gap has successfully achieved impressive gain and directivity performance of 16.75 dB and 17.40 dBi, respectively. Finally, the proposed antenna arrays are highly promising candidates for wireless communications, imaging, sensing, medical diagnosis and threat detection.