TY - JOUR
T1 - An overview of fractal antenna engineering research
AU - Werner, Douglas H.
AU - Ganguly, Suman
N1 - Funding Information:
This work was supponed in part by a grant from the Center for Remote Sensing under an SBIR project directed by Mr. Joe Tenbarge of Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. The authors would like to express their appreciation to Raj Mittra for his valuable comments relating to this article. The authors would also like to thank Mark A. Gingrich, Douglas J. Kem, Josh S. Petko, and Pingjuan L. Wemer for their assistance with preparing the figures used in this article. Special thanks goes to James W. Culver, Steven D. Eason, and Russell W. Libonati of Raytheon, St. Petersburg, Florida, for providing the photograph of the prototype fractal dipole antenna used in Figure IS. Special thanks also goes to Kenneth H. Church, Robert M. Taylor, William L. Warren, and Michael 1. Wilhelm of Sciperio, Inc., Stillwater, Oklahoma, for providing the photos used in Figure 16. Finally, the authors are grateful to one of the reviewers for kindly supplying Figure 11.
PY - 2003/2
Y1 - 2003/2
N2 - Recent efforts by several researchers around the world to combine fractal geometry with electromagnetic theory have led to a plethora of new and innovative antenna designs. In this report, we provide a comprehensive overview of recent developments in the rapidly growing field of fractal antenna engineering. Fractal antenna engineering research has been primarily focused in two areas: the first deals with the analysis and design of fractal antenna elements, and the second concerns the application of fractal concepts to the design of antenna arrays. Fractals have no characteristic size, and are generally composed of many copies of themselves at different scales. These unique properties of fractals have been exploited in order to develop a new class of antenna-element designs that are multi-band and/or compact in size. On the other hand, fractal arrays are a subset of thinned arrays, and have been shown to possess several highly desirable properties, including multi-band performance, low sidelobe levels, and the ability to develop rapid beamforming algorithms based on the recursive nature of fractals. Fractal elements and arrays are also ideal candidates for use in reconfigurable systems. Finally, we will provide a brief summary of recent work in the related area of fractal frequency-selective surfaces.
AB - Recent efforts by several researchers around the world to combine fractal geometry with electromagnetic theory have led to a plethora of new and innovative antenna designs. In this report, we provide a comprehensive overview of recent developments in the rapidly growing field of fractal antenna engineering. Fractal antenna engineering research has been primarily focused in two areas: the first deals with the analysis and design of fractal antenna elements, and the second concerns the application of fractal concepts to the design of antenna arrays. Fractals have no characteristic size, and are generally composed of many copies of themselves at different scales. These unique properties of fractals have been exploited in order to develop a new class of antenna-element designs that are multi-band and/or compact in size. On the other hand, fractal arrays are a subset of thinned arrays, and have been shown to possess several highly desirable properties, including multi-band performance, low sidelobe levels, and the ability to develop rapid beamforming algorithms based on the recursive nature of fractals. Fractal elements and arrays are also ideal candidates for use in reconfigurable systems. Finally, we will provide a brief summary of recent work in the related area of fractal frequency-selective surfaces.
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U2 - 10.1109/MAP.2003.1189650
DO - 10.1109/MAP.2003.1189650
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:0038354738
SN - 1045-9243
VL - 45
SP - 38
EP - 57
JO - IEEE Antennas and Propagation Magazine
JF - IEEE Antennas and Propagation Magazine
IS - 1
ER -