Analysis, simulation and measurements of CBS antennas loaded with non-uniformly biased ferrite material

When ferrite materials are used in antenna designs, they introduce some interesting and unique performance characteristics. One of the attractive features, for example, is the ability to reconfigure the center frequency of the antenna. In addition, ferrite materials also introduce a number of challenges in the modeling and simulation of such antennas. In order for the ferrite material to be useful in an antenna design, it usually is subjected to an external magnetic field. This field induces the internal magnetic field inside the ferrite material. The internal field plays a pivotal role in the radiation characteristics of the antenna. Thus, from the numerical point of view, accurate computation of this field is critical to the overall accuracy of the analysis. Usually the internal field is non-uniform and its computation is often a rather complex and non-trivial task. Therefore, to facilitate the modeling, simplifying assumptions, which introduce some kind of averaging, are often made. In this study, ferrite-loaded cavity-backed slot antennas are used to demonstrate that averaging procedures can lead to very unsatisfactory results. For instance, it is common practice to assume that the external field is uniform by averaging its distribution. One of the pivotal points in this study is the demonstration that the external magnetic field plays a very significant role and should be included in the modeling without averaging, if the accurate results are to be attained. Results presented in this study clearly support this argument. A procedure which avoids such averaging is presented and verified by comparing simulations with measurements. In contrast to the previous formulations, the modeling methodology developed in this dissertation leads to accurate results which compare very well with measurements for both uniform and non-uniform field distributions. The utility of this methodology is especially evident for the case when the magnetic field is severely non-uniform.