Evaluating radiation efficiency from characteristic currents

Abstract

This study describes an effective technique for calculating modal radiation efficiency calculation based on decomposition into characteristic modes. The key assumption is that the current distribution on the perfect electric conductor is almost the same as in the case of a very good conductor, for example, metals such as copper, aluminium and silver. This assumption is verified against the conventional technique, the impedance boundary condition (IBC). The proposed approach does not require any modification of the formulation of method of moments for perfectly conducting surfaces, which is assumed for the modal decomposition. Modal efficiencies provide an additional insight that is useful especially for the design of small antennas. Taking the feeding into account, the modal losses can be summed up to obtain the total efficiency. The technique works perfectly for common metals, is fully comparable with the IBC, and can easily be incorporated into any present-day in-house solver. A numerical analysis of three antennas is presented to demonstrate the merits of the approach. Radiation efficiency of coupled dipoles, an electrically small meandered dipole, and PIFA were investigated by the presented method. The results are in perfect agreement with the reference commercial package.