Enhancing Ku Band Antenna Performance Through Supershaped Design Elements

This article examine the development of an aperture-coupled patch antenna operating in the downlink Ku band (10.7 to 12.75 GHz), extracting the innovative application of the superformula to enhance its performance. The antenna is constructed using two RO4350B® substrates separated by an air gap. The bottom substrate integrates a feeding line, and a supershaped slot is embedded in the ground plane. The air gap between the two substrates aims to lower the effective dielectric constant and thus improve the impedance matching. The top substrate features a radiating patch whose shape is also crafted using the superformula. The study aims to compare the performance enhancements across four antenna topologies: a conventional slot-coupled antenna with bow-tie and rectangular slots, a supershaped slot paired with a rectangular patch, a configuration where both the slot and patch are obtained using the superformula, and an optimized supershaped antenna. These topologies exhibit 18.6 %, 19.4 %, 20.5 %, and 21.6 % fractional bandwidth and maximum gains of 8.7 dBi, 8.7 dBi, 8.6 dBi, and 9.1 dBi in the target frequency band, respectively.