Resumen de Contribution to the physical interpretation of characteristic mode resonances. Application to dielectric resonator antennas
The Theory of Characteristic Modes is being adopted by many research groups around the world in the last decade. This topic and their use in different metallic antenna design is growing very fast. However, most of the applications has been only concentrated on conducting surfaces without any physical knowledge about its limitations and its physical interpretation. As far as dielectric bodies are concerned, there have not been so many published articles. The reason is that there are different integro-differential formulations and the interpretation of their solutions is not as obvious as in conducting bodies. Here, a theoretical interpretation considering loss-less conducting and dielectric bodies is presented.
The conclusions drawn in this thesis will allow us to better understand the solutions of the Theory of Characteristic Modes and their limitations. This is important for antenna engineering. In addition, this analysis will allow to develop a novel method for the design of antennas based on dielectric resonators, DRA. This method is called Substructure based-PMCHWT method, and is based on the implementation of the Schur complements of the method of moments matrix operator. This study permits to optimize the radiation bandwidth in the same analysis process for both, the dielectric and the feed, e.g. slot. Moreover, it allows to understand how the slot behaves in the presence of the dielectric resonator and vice versa. This method can also be used to design DRA using low permittivities. This is important in the design of DRA because the feed perturbs the system and produces a shift in the resonances of the characteristic modes. So, therefore, by considering the feed system in the characteristic modes analysis a more realistic results than a conventional analysis is obtained. On the other hand, the resonances of the characteristic modes at low permittivities are displaced from what are the natural resonances of the dielectric resonator and also the corresponding S11 resonance. Thus, designing with this new method it can draw new conclusions about the design of DRA using the Theory of Characteristic Modes.
