A carbon nanotube patch antenna for polarization selective radiation performance

Carbon nanotube (CNT) has shown its huge significance in many applications. It was also applied to the patch antenna to evaluate the performance of the CNTs as a radio frequency radiator, This paper first presented a comparison between a conventional copper patch antenna and an epoxy-CNT composite antenna with the same dimension. Then the striped epoxy-CNT antenna was proposed to investigate the radiation pattern selective performance. The results showed that the epoxy-CNT composite layer added on the patch antenna shifted the resonant frequency with 150 MHz. The orientation of the CNT strip was found to have a unique polarization sensitivity behavior effects on the radiation pattern of the patch antenna. Optimal radio performance was observed when the strips were located in parallel with the E-plane of the patch antenna. When the CNT was located orthogonally to the E-plane of the patch antenna, a reduction of total gain of 8dB was observed in the boresight. This finding will be studied further, and it may have potential applications to the polarization-selective radio frequency system, such as the GNSS-R system.