1512 IEEE ANTENNAS AND WIRELESS PROPAGATION LETTERS, VOL. 18, NO.
7, JULY 2019
Dual-Polarized 5.75 GHz Optically Transparent
Antenna Arrays
Jean Lambert Kubwimana , Student Member, IEEE, Nicholas J. Kirsch , Senior Member, IEEE,
Cyle Ziegler , Member, IEEE, George Kontopidis, Member, IEEE, and Brough Tuner , Member, IEEE
Abstract—Optically transparent antenna arrays create oppor-
tunities to deploy communication systems in more diverse loca-
tions due to their transparency and ability to steer energy. We
present horizontally and vertically polarized, optically transparent
antenna arrays designed and fabricated with a highly conductive
mesh wire on top of a Lexan substrate that operate in the 5–6 GHz
unlicensed band. These arrays were modeled in HFSS, fabricated,
and tested in an anechoic chamber. Measured results show that
each transparent antenna in the array can achieve a peak gain of
6.5 dBi as compared to 7.8 dBi for a traditional antenna array.
Index Terms—Antenna arrays, microstrip antenna arrays,
multiple-input–multiple-output (MIMO) system, beam steering,
spatial multiplexing.
I. INTRODUCTION
ECENT developments in wireless communication have
R prompted the search for multiple ways to improve indoor
and outdoor communications. Many wireless devices are present
in our lives, but ubiquitous communication is yet to be realized
due to physical limitations of placing antennas. Future wireless
communication systems will utilize multiple antennas to support
applications that require high capacity, bandwidth, and gain, thus
increasing the spatial constraints.
Transparent arrays address the need for both improved system
capacity and eliminate the limitation of the location where anten-
nas can be deployed; possible deployments include on the win-
dows of cars and buildings. Their transparency property makes
them favorable for many electronic devices [1], [2]. Transparent
antennas are made from different materials and vary in cost and
performance. Previous work has shown that a transparent an-
tenna can be made from three main conductive elements: trans-
parent conductive oxides (TCOs), conductive polymers, and thin
mesh wires.
TCOs have a high sheet resistance and require advanced man-
ufacturing. The high sheet resistance of TCOs results in low-
efficiency antennas [2]–[5]. Conductive polymer antennas can
be manufactured easily and are conformal, but are limited by
Manuscript received January 9, 2019; revised May 5, 2019 and May 24, 2019;
accepted May 27, 2019. Date of publication June 5, 2019; date of current version
July 3, 2019. This work was supported in part by the National Science Foundation
under Grant IIP1353254. (Corresponding author: Jean Lambert Kubwimana.)
J. L. Kubwimana, N. J. Kirsch, and C. Ziegler are with the University
of New Hampshire, Durham, NH 03824 USA (e-mail: jlk1002@unh.edu;
nicholas.kirsch@unh.edu; cwl34@unh.edu).
G. Kontopidis and B. Tuner are with the netBlazr, Inc., Charlestown, MA
02129 USA (e-mail: george@netblazr.com; brough@netblazr.com).
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/LAWP.2019.2921196
1536-1225 © 2019 IEEE. Personal use is permitted, but republication/redistribution requires IEEE permission.
See http://www.ieee.org/publications_standards/publications/rights/index.html for more information.
low conductivity and optical transparency [6]–[8]. Conductive
thin mesh wires have low surface resistivity (.0052 Ω/sq), a
high optical transparency of more than 80.3%, and cost less to
manufacture. Though transparent conducting oxides have higher
transparency than conductive meshes, they performed poorly
compared to conductive meshes due to intrinsic property limi-
tations [9]–[19].
Previous investigations for transparent mesh materials were
primarily for the application on automobile windshields and the
solar cell where a metal ground plane was used [1]–[4], [12],
[13]. A fully transparent array made from thin wire mesh was
not studied in the literature. The contribution of this letter is
the presentation and design of a four-element transparent an-
tenna array with horizontal and vertical polarization suitable for
beamforming, beamsteering, and spatial multiplexing in the un-
licensed 5–6 GHz band. In this letter, we specifically studied the
performance of every individual antenna in the array. Our other
contributions include an analysis of each array element and the
impact of interelement spacing. The antenna arrays were mod-
eled in HFSS, fabricated, and tested in an anechoic chamber.
In our results, we present a comparison of simulation and mea-
sured results from our transparent antennas to an opaque array
fabricated with traditional materials.
II. MESH ANTENNA ARRAY DESIGN
A. Design of Antenna Array Elements
To design a 4 × 4 uniform linear antenna array, we started by
designing a single vertically and horizontally polarized patch
antenna. The transparent patch antenna was fabricated using a
conducting mesh material with a conductivity of 0.674 S/m and
surface resistance of 0.28 Ω/sq. The realizable dimensions of the
mesh antenna were calculated and optimized using (P ∗ (N −
1) + Q), where P and Q are the pitch and width of the mesh
material, respectively, and N is a number of mesh lines [4], [9],
[13], [20].
The mesh material used in this project has a pitch of 297 μm,
the line width of 25.9 μm, and height of 5.3 μm. This material
pitch, along with its width and thickness, produces optical trans-
parency of 84.5% and 77.8% efficiency compared to the opaque
counterpart. Transparency is the percentage ratio of no metal
area over metal areas. The dielectric material chosen for the
transparent antenna is Lexan due to its optical transparency prop-
erties. The physical and electromagnetic properties of Lexan in-
clude a thickness (h) of 2.93 mm and a relative permittivity (εr )
KUBWIMANA et al.: DUAL-POLARIZED 5.75 GHz OPTICALLY TRANSPARENT ANTENNA ARRAYS 1513

Fig. 2. Fabricated Vertically and horizontally polarized arrays. (a) Vertical.

(b) Horizontal.

Fig. 1. Dimensions of vertical and horizontal patch antenna. (a) Vertical patch.
(b) Horizontal patch.

TABLE I
DIMENSIONS USED FOR BOTH POLARIZED PATCH ANTENNA

Fig. 3. S11 plots of measured (Meas.) and simulated (Sim.) of each of the
elements within each of the vertically polarized arrays. (a) First element in the
of 2.8 at 5.75 GHz. The opaque antennas were designed using array. (b) Second element in the array. (c) Third element in the array. (d) Four
element in the array.
a Rogers 4350B substrate with h = 1.524 mm and εr of 3.48 at
5.75 GHz.
Escobar et al. have shown that due to a finite number of mesh
wires, it is not practical to feed a transparent mesh antenna with
a transmission line that has the same impedance as the antenna
[9]. Therefore, we have matched the antenna to 100 Ω trans-
mission line, then a quarter wavelength transformer was used to
match it to 50 Ω. The patch elements were designed using equa-
tions delivered by Balanis [21] and Kraus and Marhefka [22].
An inset feed was used in both patch designs to match with a
100 Ω transmission line. The radiating element of the antenna
is composed of the patch antenna, a 100 Ω transmission line, a
quarter-wave transformer, and 50 Ω transmission line.
A single vertical polarization antenna consists of a 50 Ω trans-
mission line, a quarter-wave transformer, and a 100 Ω transmis-
sion line. The horizontally polarized antenna was designed with
the same dimensions as the vertically polarized one, but with a
90◦ elbow λ/16 long. The theoretically calculated dimensions
for both the patch and transmission lines were rounded to the
nearest mesh line, ensuring that each transparent element had a
continuous conductive mesh perimeter. The length of the elbow
was chosen and optimized to reduce mutual coupling. Fig. 4. S11 plots of measured (Meas.) and simulated (Sim.) of each of the
The complete geometry of the vertically and horizontally po- elements within each of the horizontally polarized arrays. (a) First element in
the array. (b) Second element in the array. (c) Third element in the array. (d)
larized single antennas is shown in Fig. 1, and calculated dimen- Four element in the array.
sions are shown in Table I.
1514 IEEE ANTENNAS AND WIRELESS PROPAGATION LETTERS, VOL. 18, NO. 7, JULY 2019

TABLE II
SUMMARY OF RESULTS FOR HORIZONTALLY POLARIZED ARRAY

TABLE III
SUMMARY OF S-PARAMETERS RESULTS OF VERTICALLY POLARIZED ARRAY

The transparent antennas have different ground planes and
substrate than the opaque antennas, which was expected to cause
a slight difference in the resonant frequencies. Furthermore, dur-
ing the fabrication process, there were variations in the patch
antenna’s length caused by the discrete mesh lines of the mesh
conductor or the results of errors within the fabrication process,
as a result the resonant frequency shifting from 5.5 to 5.75 GHz.
Therefore, to account for this change in length, simulations were
updated for new a length of 14 mm, which corresponds to a 0.9
mm length change.
B. Design and Fabrication of Arrays
Transparent and opaque arrays were designed using dimen-
sions reported in Table I. The mutual coupling between array
elements can be mitigated by increasing the interspacing dis-
tance. The distance λ, or 5.2 cm, was chosen to reduce the mutual
coupling effectively while keeping the size of the antenna rea-
sonable. These arrays are excited by a vertically and horizontally
polarized feed on top of the mesh ground plane for transparent
and copper for the opaque antenna.
The ground plane, patches, and substrate of transparent an-
tennas were cut using a high-precision laser cutter then assem-
bled using a high-transparent glue. First, rubbing alcohol was
used to clean the Lexan surfaces, easily removing excess glues,
epoxies, and related debris. The type of cloth used with rubbing
alcohol was important because clothes made with loose fibers
are susceptible to shedding when they are wiped on surfaces.
Bondic, a commercially purchased glue that cures with ultravi-
olet light exposure, is used to bond the conductive mesh material
to Lexan. The glue was cured and hardened after approximately
5 s of exposure. The fabricated arrays are shown in Fig. 2. The
resulting design was modeled in HFSS, fabricated, and tested in
an anechoic chamber.
III. PERFORMANCE
The antenna performance is characterized by two main met-
rics: reflection coefficients and radiation pattern. An Agilent
Technology E5063A vector network analyzer was used to mea-
sure S-parameters; radiation patterns were measured in an ane-
choic chamber. To better understand the performance of the ar-
rays, each element of the array was independently measured,
while the nonexcited elements were loaded. Results of the trans-
parent antennas are compared to the opaque antennas.
The first antenna performance metric analyzed is the reflec-
tion coefficient. The S-parameters are presented for all four el-
ements of the array. Figs. 3 and 4 present the reflection co-
efficients and are summarized in Tables II and III. S11 –S44
are reflection coefficients of the first to the fourth element in
the array. Fig. 3 shows that when opaque elements are verti-
cally excited, the simulated 10 dB return-loss bandwidth is be-
tween 3% and 3.1% centered at 5.75 GHz, and the measured
opaque elements bandwidth is 3.1%–3.4% centered at 5.75 GHz.
The simulated transparent elements have a bandwidth of 5%–
5.2% centered at 5.75 GHz, while the measured transparent el-
ement bandwidth is 5.2%–5.4% centered at 5.75 GHz. Fig. 4
shows that simulated opaque horizontally polarized elements
have a −10 dB bandwidth 3.1%–3.8% centered at 5.75 GHz,
and measured bandwidth is between 3.0% and 3.3% centered at
5.75 GHz. The transparent elements have a simulated −10 dB
bandwidth 5.3%–5.8% centered at 5.75 GHz and measured
bandwidth of 5.2%–6% centered at 5.75 GHz. These results
show that transparent antennas properly resonate at the expected
KUBWIMANA et al.: DUAL-POLARIZED 5.75 GHz OPTICALLY TRANSPARENT ANTENNA ARRAYS
Fig. 5. Elevation plane Co-pol and X-pol. measured (meas.) and simulated
(sim.) radiation plots of the four transparent (tran.) and opaque (opa.) elements
within each of the vertically polarized arrays. (a) First element in the array. (b)
Second element in the array. (c) Third element in the array. (d) Four element in
the array.
Fig. 6. Elevation plane copolarization (Co-pol) and cross-polarization (X-pol)
measured (meas.) and simulated (sim.) radiation plots of the four transparent
(tran.) and opaque (opa.) elements within each of the horizontally polarized
arrays. (a) First element in the array. (b) Second element in the array. (c) Third
element in the array. (d) Four element in the array.
1515
frequency, and with a comparable bandwidth to the opaque
counterpart.
The other performance metric studied is a radiation pattern.
Figs. 5 and 6 show, respectively, the E-plane radiation pattern for
all of the vertically and horizontally polarized antenna elements.
All simulated plots for opaque and transparent elements have a
maximum copolarization (Co-pol.) gain between 6.5 and 8 dBi,
whereas all measured plots for both opaque and transparent el-
ements have a Co-pol. maximum gain between 6.2 and 7.2 dBi
regardless of the plane. The difference between the maximum
gain of the measured transparent elements and that of the mea-
sured opaque elements does not exceed 1.5 dB, which concur
with research in [9], [10], and [20]. In addition, the cross po-
larization (X-pol.) is below −15 dBi for both horizontally and
vertically polarized arrays. All results show no sign of mutual
coupling between elements. The elevation plane beamwidth for
the vertically polarized antenna is 70◦ , versus 120◦ for the hor-
izontally polarized antenna.
IV. CONCLUSION
In this letter, we presented transparent antenna arrays de-
signed to operate in 5–6 GHz unlicensed spectrum. The goal
was to have a complete meshed transparent array and compare
the performance to a solid copper array.
Simulation and measured results show array elements achieve
a −10 dB bandwidth, 2.7%–6% transparent elements, and gain
of 6–7.2 dBi, with a transparency of 84.5% and efficiency of
77.8%. The transparent vertically and horizontally polarized
patch antenna arrays presented in this research are a viable sub-
stitution for their opaque counterparts operating in the 5.75 GHz
frequency band.
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