Özet:
In this article, an I-slot circular patch antenna conformed on a spherical structure
is proposed. For the implementation of the proposed antenna, the polylactic
acid (PLA) material is used with the help of a 3D printer. In accordance
with this purpose, we determine the permittivity value of the PLA with a
T-resonator method before the design process. Then, the geometrical design of
the spherical patch antenna is optimized by means of a differential evolution
algorithm. After the design and optimization process, the conformal spherical
patch antenna is fabricated on a sphere cap. The main characteristics of the
proposed antenna are given for both the simulations and the measurements. It
is seen that the simulation results agree well with the measurement results.
Furthermore, an experiment is performed in order to examine the application
possibility of the presented spherical antenna. For this experiment, a spherical
communication module with the proposed antenna and an inner wireless
transmitter system is built. In this experiment, the spherical module is rolled
down a slope while it continuously transmits pseudo-random numbers. The
data are received by a receiver station at the top of the slope. The received data
are evaluated in terms of the amount of received packets per unit of time. The
numerical results indicate that the proposed antenna can be used for dynamic
spherical systems such as throwable objects and spherical robots.