About the session
Chairs: Raj Mittra (Penn State University, USA), Ala Sharaiha (Université de Rennes 1 & IETR, France)
Antenna design can be considered as an art of shaping and choosing materials to produce a desired current distribution on the antenna structure. Antenna current optimization is a tool to determine an optimal current distribution which can be used for physical understanding, as a priori estimates of the possibilities to design antennas, physical bounds, and as figures of merits for antenna designs. Antenna current optimization is particularly useful for small antennas for which the Q-factor and stored energy are of primary importance. In this presentation, antenna current optimization and stored electromagnetic energy expressions are reviewed. A tutorial description of the steps used to determine the lower bounds on the Q-factor for arbitrarily shaped structures and structures embedded in metallic structures are presented. Moreover, it is demonstrated how the approach can be modified to handle lossy and dispersive materials as well as antenna quantities such as efficiency, gain, directivity, and capacity.
