Novel hybrid metamaterial to improve the performance of a beamforming antenna

This paper investigates the design and implementation of a novel hybrid metamaterial unit cell to improve a beamforming Wi-Fi antenna's performance. The proposed metamaterial unit cell is created on an FR-4 substrate (ε_γ = 4.4) and a thickness of 1.6 mm. The metallization height of the unit cell is maintained at 0.035 mm. The designed metamaterial unit cell is simulated using HFSS Ver. 18.2 to verify the double negative behaviour. The unit cell consists of five Split Ring Resonators (SRR's) at the bottom and a hexagonal ring of six triangles. Initially, a conventional inset fed microstrip patch antenna is designed then an array of the proposed unit cell is created and used as a superstrate to study the performance. A Three Element Antenna Array (TEAA) is designed to operate at 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi band, and the superstrate created out of the proposed unit cell is used to study its effect. Metamaterial superstrate improved the conventional Single Element Antenna (SEA) gain by approximately 2 dB. Superstrate with TEAA exhibited an improved gain of 1 dB over TEAA. (paper)