Designing of reflectarray antenna using ceramic substrate

Alumina is an engineering material that has a high melting temperature, strength and hardness. The use of aluminum in Turkey is becoming increasingly more common. As one of its areas of application, one can mention the fact that the dielectric layer of the base material for the circuits that are part of the circuit design is made of this material. Even though the production of electronic base material is common in Turkey, the products are simple, inefficient and have high signal loss; unfortunately, these produced materials cannot be used for advanced electronic circuit designs that require high performance. For such applications, it becomes necessary to import high-performance electrical base material especially from the USA, Germany and China. Furthermore, products by companies that manufacture advanced level materials such as Rogers are banned from being supplied in Turkey and developing countries; hence, such materials cannot be used in Turkey or they are supplied by mediator companies. For that reason, it becomes unavoidable to use low-quality electronic base materials in Turkey and the base materials produced are lower quality and more costly. The priority objective of the project is to conduct studies on the design principles, parameters and modelling of an alumina-based dielectric base material and to work on the production of a material with high performance, low signal loss and ability to operate at frequencies of 10GHz and above. Furthermore, it is aimed to ensure the production of base materials with different dielectric conductivities and material heights with the data acquired as a result of this study and to facilitate the production of advanced electronic and electromagnetic circuit designs, which are costly and difficult in terms of design and implementation in Turkey. Another aim is to design and implement a reflective array antenna, which is highly dependent on the electronic base material according to the results obtained in the project. The importance of this project can be briefly summarized as follows: Reflective array antennas are generally used in the fields of earth-to-satellite link, radar and similar areas and these materials should enable the production of products that are high in gain and small in size. Unfortunately, the only base material manufactured in Turkey is FR4 (Glass Fiber) base material and this material can be used in favorable designs of up to 7GHz; therefore, it is not possible to enable these designs using the possibilities in Turkey and the materials that need to be used in design are supplied as being of international origin. We believe that the data to be obtained as part of the project and the high-performance base material to be designed will contribute to the development of such designs within the framework of possibilities in Turkey and also trigger the start of a foundation and research required for more advanced and sophisticated studies. This would ensure that high-cost consumable material costs and dependency on external resources in communication and military projects would reduce to a great extent. Keywords: Alumina, Al2O3, Electronic circuit design, Dielectric, electronic base material, modeling, FR4, Military projects, Artificial Neural Networks (YSA), Metaheuristic Algorithms