Circular Waveguide Feed to the Multilayer DRA
Bratin Ghosh*, Ajay Kumar Tiwari, Dhrubajyoti Bhattacharya and Pranab Kumar Goswami
Department of Electronics & Electrical Communication Engineering,
Indian Institute of Technology,
Kharagpur, India
bghosh@ece.iitkgp.ernet.in, er.ajaytewari@gmail.com, dhrubaj15@gmail.com, pranab.picklu.com@gmail.com
Abstract — A two-layer hemispherical DRA coupled
to the circular waveguide through an annular slot is
proposed. The configuration is easy to realize and
avoids the need of additional coupling or matching
elements to couple to the DRA. Good return loss
characteristics with enhanced bandwidth is obtained.
In addition, stable radiation pattern with low cross-pol
is obtained in the impedance bandwidth.
Keywords — Dielectric resonator antenna (DRA),
circular waveguide, annular slot, multilayer DRA.
I. INTRODUCTION
The dielectric resonator antenna (DRA) has emerged as
a low-loss efficient radiating element due to the absence of
conductor and surface wave loss [1]. Further, the DRA
also offers easy excitation through a number of planar and
non-planar coupling schemes.
The rectangular waveguide feed to the DRA has
attracted much research attention as a low-interference and
a high power feed topology with no radiation loss. It is
however noted that good coupling to the rectangular
waveguide could only be achieved with a DRA of high-
permittivity with dielectric constant 82.0 [2]. Insufficient
coupling was however observed for waveguide coupling to
lower permittivity DRAs [3]. The coupling could be
improved only with the use of a coax probe fed DRA /
stacked DRA [4] or embedded DRA configurations [5],
which would involve drilling a hole into the DRA to
accommodate the probe. An alternative configuration
using a second DRA inside the waveguide in addition to
the radiating DRA was used in [6] to focus the incident
waveguide field on the slot. The bandwidth was improved
by using an I-slot, with an impedance bandwidth of 5.38%.
The coupling to the waveguide was enhanced using a
multilayer DRA configuration in [7], with the impedance
bandwidth increased to 12.65%.
The circular waveguide has been used as an effective
feed configuration for the horn antenna, the lens and also
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as prime-focus feeds. However, this versatile feed topology
has not been investigated as a possible feed candidate to the
DRA. In this work, the circular waveguide coupled to the
multilayer DRA through an annular-slot is investigated. It
is also shown that enhanced and broadband coupling can be
achieved for the current configuration using a two-layer
DRA structure that is simpler than the three-layer DRA
structure needed for the rectangular waveguide feed.
II. DESIGN OF THE CIRCULAR WAVEGUIDE FEED
TO MULTILAYER DRA
Fig. 1 shows the antenna configuration for the two-layer
DRA coupled to the circular waveguide through an annular
slot in the ground plane. The radii of the inner and outer
layers of the antenna are ‫ݎ‬ଵ = 10 mm, ‫ݎ‬ଶ = 16 mm with the
inner and outer layer permittivities as ߝ௥ଵ =1, ߝ௥ଶ =10
respectively. The waveguide, of radius r w = 13 mm, is
excited in the dominant TE 11 mode and coupled to the
antenna through the shorted end. The ground plane
dimensions are 200 mm x 200 mm, with a thickness of 1
mm. The radius of the annular slot is r s = 6.25 mm with a
width of w s = 0.5 mm.
The antenna structure was simulated using the
electromagnetic software tool HFSS. The return loss and
normalized input impedance for the antenna is shown in
Fig. 2. A very good coupling over a wide frequency
bandwidth is observed, with a 10-dB impedance bandwidth
of 16.20 %. This is result of the fact that the multilayer
DRA configuration acts as an impedance transformer
Fig. 1. Two-layer hemispherical DRA coupled to shorted
end of circular waveguide through annular slot.
AP-S 2016

(a) (b)
Fig. 2. Simulated coupling characteristics of the two-layer
DRA slot-coupled to the circular waveguide. (a) Return
loss. (b) Normalized input impedance.
between the free space and the waveguide.
The lower resonant dip at 8.2 GHz corresponds to the
resonance of the annular slot with an unloaded resonance
at 7.64 GHz. The upper resonance at 9.12 GHz is due to
the TE 112 mode of the two-layer DRA. It may be noted that
the corresponding unloaded resonant frequency of the
TE 112 mode for the two-layer DRA computed from the
characteristic equation is also at 9.12 GHz. Thus, the wide
band coupling is due to the merging of the annular slot
resonance with the antenna resonance. It can be observed
that the incorporation of the second layer in the DRA
structure provides additional control over tuning the
resonant frequency of the antenna mode and coupling it
with the slot resonance, since the source-free resonant
frequency of the TE 112 mode can be tuned by appropriately
choosing the permittivity and thickness of the inner and
outer layers. In addition, it is also observed that a two-
layer DRA structure can be used to enhance the matching
and the impedance bandwidth in this case, compared to a
three-layer DRA for the rectangular waveguide [7]. With
the inner layer permittivity corresponding to free-space,
the air-gap problem between two dielectric layers can also
(a) (b)
Fig. 3. Simulated radiation pattern for the antenna structure
at 8.2 GHz (a) x-z plane. (b) y-z plane.
(a) (b)
Fig. 4. Simulated radiation pattern for the antenna structure
at 9.12 GHz (a) x-z plane. (b) y-z plane.
146
be potentially avoided for fabrication of the current antenna
structure. It should also be noted that it is important to keep
the inner DRA layer of unity permittivity to match with the
permittivity of the medium inside the waveguide for
optimum bandwidth.
The simulated radiation pattern for the antenna structure
at the lower and upper resonances are shown in Fig. 3 and
Fig. 4 respectively. It is observed that broadside pattern
characteristics with low cross-pol are observed at both the
resonances. The simulated antenna gain are at 5.48 dBi and
5.89 dBi at 8.2 GHz and 9.12 GHz respectively.
III. CONCLUSION
A broadband coupling for a annular slot-coupled two-
layer DRA configuration through circular waveguide feed
is achieved by optimizing the layer thicknesses and
permittivities of the DRA, without the necessity of other
coupling or matching elements. Also, compared to a three-
layer DRA configuration needed to achieve coupling and
bandwidth enhancement for a rectangular waveguide
configuration, the current feed topology requires only two
DRA layers, avoiding any possible air-gap problems
between dielectric layers. Broadside pattern characteristics
with low cross-pol levels are observed for the antenna
configuration across the impedance bandwidth.
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