Effects of Substrate Curvature in Performances of Conformal Microstrip Arrays

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) support many applications, such as monitoring, surveillance, etc. A stable communication with UAVs or between UAVs depends on the reliability of the receiving and transmitting systems including the antennas. In this work, we observed microstrip arrays, which conform to the surface of a circular cylinder. The variation of the curvature radius shows, that the reflection factor of the conformal antenna is practically unchanged; however, the gain decreases with decreasing the curvature radius. We compared some analytical results, simulation with software and measurements.