IEEE ANTENNAS AND WIRELESS PROPAGATION LETTERS, VOL.

8, 2009 1275

Application of Bionics in Antenna Radar Cross

Section Reduction
Wen Jiang, Ying Liu, Shuxi Gong, and Tao Hong

Abstract—Bionics principle is applied to antenna radar cross

section (RCS) reduction in this letter for the first time. To authen-
ticate the method, a novel bionic ultrawideband (UWB) antenna is
proposed by use of a model of insect tentacle. Its UWB-related ra-
diation characteristics are simulated and experimentally verified.
Monostatic RCS of an insect tentacle antenna (ITA) terminated
with three different loads are studied and compared with that of
a common printed circular-disc monopole antenna (PCDMA).
The results show that compared to the reference antenna, the
novel bionic antenna has lower RCS and favorable radiation
performances. Hence, applying bionics principle to antenna RCS
reduction is feasible, which will serve as a good candidate for the
future design of antennas with a requirement of RCS control.
Index Terms—Bionics, planar monopole, radar cross section Fig. 1. Some biological photographs.
(RCS), ultrawideband (UWB) antennas.

evolutionary pressure typically forces living organisms to be-

I. INTRODUCTION
M ORE and more attention has been paid to antenna scat-
tering since it is the main contribution to the total radar
cross section (RCS) of low observable platforms. An antenna is
a special scatterer whose scattering is related with its feed ter-
mination impedance, which handicaps the design of antennas
with low RCS and good radiation characteristics simultaneously
[1]–[3].
Design and manufacture of UWB antennas is among the most
critical problems nowadays as it opens a promising door to the
future of wireless communications and military applications
such as ultrawideband (UWB) radars, military high-data-rate
wireless communications, and so on. An UWB antenna should
provide a gain and impedance bandwidth from 3.1 to 10.6 GHz.
However, with the development of target identification tech-
nology, the design of UWB antennas with low RCS becomes
crucial to the survivability of the antenna platforms, yet few
publications on the RCS reduction of UWB antennas have been
published. To solve this problem, an RCS reduction technique
using bionics principle is first proposed in this letter.
Biological methods and systems found in nature can be ap-
plied to the study and design of engineering systems and modern
technology, from which the concept of bionics is derived. The
utilization of bionics in synthetic constructs is desirable because
Manuscript received October 02, 2009; revised November 08, 2009. First
published November 24, 2009; current version published December 08, 2009.
This work was supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (No.
60801042).
The authors are with National Laboratory of Antennas and Microwave Tech-
nology, Xidian University, Shaanxi 710071, China (e-mail: jw13@vip.qq.com;
liuying@mail.xidian.edu.cn; shxgong@xidian.edu.cn; tok_hong@126.com).
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this letter are available online
at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/LAWP.2009.2037168
1536-1225/$26.00 © 2009 IEEE
come highly optimized and efficient. Experiments have proved
that a seagull has 200 times larger RCS than a cowbird, while
they are of a similar size. The dimension of a bee is smaller than
a sparrow, but the RCS of a bee is 16 times larger than that of a
sparrow [1]. The concept of bionics has been used in many ap-
plications widely and successfully. There is a reason to believe
that bionics can be applied to antenna RCS control. In the an-
imal kingdom, the sensory or tactile organ—such as an antenna,
a tentacle, or a feeler, which is shown in Fig. 1—can help insects
get external information better and keep themselves safe. In this
letter, an insect tentacle antenna (ITA) is designed based on the
shape of the insect tactile organ to demonstrate the feasibility
of applying bionics to antenna RCS reduction. There are a lot
of bionic models that could be used for antenna design in the
future. Hence, this letter may play an important role in the de-
velopment of antenna RCS reduction.
In this letter, the theoretical analysis on RCS is briefly pre-
sented in Section II, which is used for calculating antenna RCS
in Section III. In Section III, two UWB antennas, i.e., PCDMA
and ITA, are simulated, fabricated, and measured. Their charac-
teristics, including the return loss, radiation pattern, gain, group
delay, and RCS with three kinds of loads—i.e., open-circuited
load, short-circuited load, and 50- -loaded resistor (matched
load)—are presented and discussed. If the bionic antenna has
lower RCS than PCDMA and performances as good as general
UWB antennas, the technique of applying bionics principle to
antenna RCS reduction will be authenticated.
II. THEORETICAL ANALYSIS OF ANTENNA SCATTERING
It is well known that an antenna is a special scatterer and its
scattering is related with the feed termination impedance. The
scattering of antenna is structural mode scattering when its feed
port is connected with matched load. If not, part of the received
energy would be reradiated, which contributes to antenna mode
scattering. The total RCS of an antenna can be divided into
1276
Fig. 2. Geometry of PCDMA.
the following two categories: structural mode RCS and an-
tenna mode RCS . Their relationship is given by
(1)
where is the phase difference between these two modes [4].
A model was proposed to analyze the scattering of antenna
in [5]. With the scattering field in two cases, the scattering of
antenna with arbitrary load can be obtained conveniently. The
problem of phase difference between the two components is
solved. The following equation represents the antenna scattering
field under any load:
(2)
The first part of (2) is the structural mode scattering field, and
the second one is the antenna mode scattering field. is the re-
flection coefficient of load, and is the reflection coefficient of
antenna. and are the scattering field of the antenna
terminated with open-circuited load and short-circuited load, re-
spectively. In this model, the total antenna RCS can be obtained
easily through the open-circuit RCS and short-circuit RCS.
III. RESULTS AND DISCUSSIONS
PCDMA and ITA are presented in Section III. Their charac-
teristics, including the return loss, radiation pattern, gain, and
monostatic RCS, are presented and discussed. In addition, the
time-domain performance of the proposed antenna is also eval-
uated in measurements. In order to demonstrate the superiority
of the bionic antenna’s radiating element in RCS reduction, the
ground plane and dielectric substrate of the two antennas are
chosen to be the same.
A. PCDMA
PCDMA shown in Fig. 2 was proposed in [6]. In this letter,
it is chosen as a reference antenna for its good performances
and wide applications. It is printed on an FR-4 substrate with
the relative dielectric constant of 4.4. Fig. 3 presents its simu-
lated and measured return loss; the measured impedance band-
width of 10-dB return loss is from 2.8 to 12.8 GHz, which covers
IEEE ANTENNAS AND WIRELESS PROPAGATION LETTERS, VOL. 8, 2009
Fig. 3. Simulated and measured return loss of PCDMA.
Fig. 4. Geometry of ITA.
TABLE I
RADIUS AND CENTRAL ANGLE OF EACH ARC PATCH
the frequency range of UWB (3.1–10.6 GHz). The circular ra-
diating element gives the antenna good radiation performances,
but large RCS. The maximum RCS value is in the direction that
is normal to the - plane, where the most threatening direction
is and the maximum radiation of the antenna happens.
B. ITA
As illustrated in Fig. 4, an ITA with an offset ground patch
is first proposed in this letter. The radiating element is designed
based on the shape of insect tactile organ, which is simulated by
eight arc patches. Each arc patch has a width of 1 mm. These arc
patches are arranged along the -axis and are numbered 1 to 8
with the increase of value. The distance between the adjacent
patches is 3 mm, and the radius and central angle of each arc
patch are presented in Table I. Each arc patch is symmetrical.
As shown in Fig. 5, its measured bandwidth of 10-dB return
loss is from 3.0 to 14.0 GHz. Its antenna radiation pattern mea-
surements have been performed in an anechoic chamber at 3.0
and 9.0 GHz in the principal cuts, - and -planes, which cor-
respond to - and - planes, respectively. At each frequency,
the radiation patterns in the - and -planes are normalized. As
seen in Fig. 6, the agreement between simulations and measure-
ments is very good. The bionic antenna may be seen as a planar
JIANG et al.: APPLICATION OF BIONICS IN ANTENNA RADAR CROSS SECTION REDUCTION
Fig. 5. Simulated and measured return loss of ITA.
Fig. 6. Simulated and measured radiation patterns of ITA: (a) 3.0 GHz, E -plane
(b) 3.0 GHz, H -plane (c) 9.0 GHz, E -plane (d) 9.0 GHz, H -plane.
Fig. 7. Measured gain of PCDMA and ITA.
monopole whose maximum radiation is normal to the antenna
-axis. The bionic antenna exhibits a stable omnidirectional ra-
diation behavior across the UWB.
Measured antenna gain values of PCDMA and ITA at dis-
crete frequency points are shown in Fig. 7. The whole tendency
is that the antenna gain values rises with the increasing fre-
quency from 3 to 12 GHz. The average measured values of the
gain of PCDMA and ITA are 3.84 and 3.95 dBi, respectively.
Fig. 8 shows the experimental results of the group delay of ITA
using the vector network analyzer. The group delay is less than
0.5 ns from 3 to 14 GHz. We can see from Fig. 8 that the
1277
Fig. 8. Experimental results of the group delay of ITA.
Fig. 9. RCS of PCDMA and ITA with open-circuited load.
Fig. 10. RCS of PCDMA and ITA with short-circuited load.
transfer function of the designed antenna has good transient re-
sponse in the working band. All results show that the bionic an-
tenna is a good candidate for future UWB application.
C. RCS Discussions
RCS values of the two antennas terminated with open-cir-
cuited load, short-circuited load, and matched load are shown
in Figs. 9–11, respectively. Each figure includes the RCS values
for two polarizations, i.e., the incident electric fields are parallel
to the -axis and -axis. The incident wave direction is parallel
to the -axis, where the most threatening direction, the max-
imum RCS value, and the maximum radiation of the antennas
are.
The values of Figs. 9–11 can be used to obtain structural mode
RCS, antenna mode RCS, and total antenna RCS by (2). When
the antenna is terminated with different loads, the structural
mode scattering will remain invariable, but the antenna mode
scattering will change. When the two UWB antennas are ter-
minated with different kinds of loads, none of the RCS values
1278
Fig. 11. RCS comparison of PCDMA and ITA with matched load.
Fig. 12. RCS comparison of PCDMA and ITA.
is the greatest or smallest one over the whole frequency band,
which is different from narrowband antennas [7]. It is because
the frequency range is so wide that the dynamic range of the
phase difference between the structural mode RCS and antenna
mode RCS is large. This brings a challenge to RCS reduction of
UWB antennas because of their ultrawide impedance band.
Simulated structural mode RCS values of the two antennas
are shown in Fig. 11. Measured total antenna RCS curves of the
two antennas are shown in Fig. 12. Conclusions reached by the
results above are as follows. ITA has lower RCS than PCDMA
in the whole band that covers the frequency range of UWB. An-
tenna mode scattering is related to the antenna gain. The average
value of the gain of ITA is larger than that of PCDMA, which
leads to the result that the antenna mode RCS of ITA is larger
than that of PCDMA. Hence, the RCS of ITA is reduced mainly
due to the reduced structural mode RCS, which is caused by the
relatively smaller geometrical size. The phenomena will not dis-
appear at other angles in the -plane because the RCS reduction
comes from the reduction of the structural mode scattering.
However, the method of reducing the geometrical size of the
antenna is not generally applicable to obtain antenna RCS re-
duction. As an example, an annular antenna (AA) is presented.
AA has an annular radiating element with an outer radius of 16
mm and an inner radius of 13 mm. The ground plane and dielec-
tric substrate of PCDMA and AA are the same. The annular ra-
diating element has a much smaller size than circular and bionic
ones. Fig. 13 shows the RCS comparison of PCDMA and AA.
As shown in Fig. 13, in low-frequency range, the RCS of AA
is larger than that of PCDMA, although AA has a smaller geo-
metrical size. This is because the scale of the antenna is similar
IEEE ANTENNAS AND WIRELESS PROPAGATION LETTERS, VOL. 8, 2009
Fig. 13. RCS comparison of PCDMA and AA.
to the incident wavelength, and the antenna scattering should be
regarded as the low-frequency resonance scattering that makes
decreasing area not so effective in antenna RCS reduction. How-
ever, ITA overcomes the shortcoming effectively. ITA has lower
RCS than PCDMA in the whole band.
IV. CONCLUSION
The radiation characteristics of PCDMA and ITA have been
studied both theoretically and experimentally. Their monostatic
RCS values are also simulated, measured, and compared. The
results show that ITA has lower RCS and better radiation char-
acteristics than PCDMA. ITA is a good UWB antenna with fa-
vorable radiation performances and attractively low RCS simul-
taneously. It is also a good example to demonstrate the feasi-
bility of the proposed method. The superiority of the bionic ra-
diating element in RCS reduction is proved. Consequently, the
technique of applying bionics principle to antenna RCS reduc-
tion is valid. This letter provides a novel direction to the future
design of antennas with or without a requirement of RCS con-
trol.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The authors are especially grateful to the Anechoic Chamber
of the National Laboratory of Antennas and Microwave Tech-
nology of China for providing measuring facilities.
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