Antenna system design for 24 GHz automotive radar systems

Because of its characteristics of low cost, minimal weight and low profile over a wide spectrum of frequencies, in recent years, the use of microstrip patch antennas increased dramatically. Those make the microstrip antennas suitable for radars generally and automotive radar systems especially. In order to improve some of the features of patch antennas and develop its performance, antenna arrays are generally used in the academic and industry communities. However, two challenges still for the radar antenna design, namely the high side lobe level and how the antenna radiation pattern will be scanned. Therefore, in this thesis, Microstrip patch reconfigurable antenna system with the lowest possible level of side lobes for automotive radar systems is proposed. Antennas designed with 8, 16, 32, 64 numbers of elements. Antennas depend on rectangular elements and series fed sub arrays. The centre frequency is 24.125 GHz. Antennas are located on Rogers RO4003 substrate material with εr=3.55 and the thickness of the substrate h is 0.508mm. The obtained side lobes level ranged between -12 and -20 dB. While the gain is between 12 and 21.7 dB. With MA4AGBL912 diodes the antenna radiation pattern scanned 10 degrees. All the results are obtained by using CST and HFSS 19 simulators with MATLAB program to calculate the mathematical complex operations.