Mathematical Modelling on the Effects of Conductive Material and Substrate Thickness for Air Substrate Microstrip Patch Antenna

The use of microstrip patch configuration in the 5th generation (5G) wireless network is expected to fulfill the demands of smartphone users by significantly increasing the capacity of the communication technology. The main aim of this paper is to disclose the development of a mathematical model on the effects of conductive material and substrate thicknesses on the centre frequency for the performance evaluation of a low profile, costeffective antenna in 5G devices applications. This mathematical model is proposed for an antenna system operated with air substrate resonating at a bandwidth range of 5 GHz - 38 GHz. The effects of different thickness of conductive material and substrate on the antenna's bandwidth, gain, and efficiency for 5G applications were studied. Antennas were fabricated and tested in this study to evaluate the robustness of the proposed mathematical model at 28 GHz, 24 GHz, and 10 GHz. Gains of 9.55 dBi, 9.53 dBi and 10.1 dBi, impedance bandwidths of 2.12 GHz, 2.14 GHz and 0.41 GHz, with input reflection coefficients of 42.75 dB, 25.33dB and 21.51 dB, and performance efficiencies of 98.91, 87.4 and 83.2% were obtained for the respective resonances. For validation of results, the experimental results and the simulation results from the proposed mathematical model were made into comparison, and excellent correlation between the measured and simulated results was obtained.