Design and fabrication of low gain fractal antenna for space application

The objective of this project is to enhance current technologies in the field of aerospace communication s to facilitate data transfer s using CubeSat s. The idea is to design a fractal patch antenna for CubeSat that operates in multiple frequencies and occupies only one of the faces of the cube. The demand for next generation wireless network applications motivated antenna designers to d evelop new antennas that appear miniaturized to adapt to CubeSat space requirements, and still be useful for many wireless standards. The most important requirements for such kind of antenna are that the antenna should support diverse applications . The fu ndamental idea of this project is to achieve these requirements with a fractal pattern design . By implementing a fractal design we intend to achieve an efficient, light - weight, robust and scalable antenna system for satellites. To further improve the ante nna radiation and adjust the frequency of resonance towards 2.4 GH z a Sierpinski carpet fractal antenna is designed and simulated usin g CST microwave studio software. The antenna is optimized as documented in the thesis comparing the different iterations o f the fractal antenna , starting with just the patch and increasing the number of holes mathematically. Finally the optimized design is simulated over a mock CubeSat designed using Solidworks to illustrate the radiation efficiency in real time environment . The resulting S11 parameter, efficiency and Z - Matrix are plotted to illustrate the different results. T he efficiency of the antenna being simulated in a realistic environment is lower than that of the standalone antenna but still higher compared to a pla ne patch antenna.