Design and Performance Analysis of Different Dielectric Substrate based Microstrip Patch Antenna for 5G Applications

In this paper, a 3.5 GHz microstrip patch antenna using three different substrates materials with varying relative permittivity have been designed. However, the thickness of the substrates are slightly different from each other which is 1.6 mm for FR-4, 1.575 mm for RT-5880 and 1.58 mm for TLC-30 have been chosen to carry out this work. The three substrates materials are FR-4 (Design-1), RT-5880 (Design-2), and TLC-30 (Design-3) with the relative permittivity of 4.3, 2.2, and 3, respectively. The antennas' performances in terms of reflection coefficient, voltage standing wave ratio (VSWR), bandwidth, gain, and efficiency performance is simulated, analyzed and compared using CST Microwave studio (CST 2019). The findings reveal that there is a significant change in gain and bandwidth due to different relative permittivity and the thickness value of the substrate materials. The gains achieved were at 3.338 dB, 4.660 dB, and 5.083 dB for Design-1, Design-2 and Design-3 respectively. The efficiency of the antennas also showed that TLC-30 gave the best efficiency at 75.70% when compared to FR-4 which was at 60.13% and RT-5880 which was at 61.51% efficiency. All the proposed antennas have a bandwidth above 100 MHz where Design-1 had a bandwidth of 247.1 MHz whilst Design-2 had a bandwidth of 129.7 MHz and finally, Design-3 had a bandwidth of 177.2 MHz.