 Introduction:

For many years, the dielectric resonator (DR) has primarily been used in
microwave circuits, such as oscillators and filters, where the DR is normally made

of high-permittivity material, with dielectric constant εr > 20. Although open DRs
were found to radiate many years ago, the idea of using the DR as an antenna had
not been widely accepted until the original paper on the cylindrical dielectric
resonator antenna (DRA)was published in 1983 [1].

Statement of the problem:

Low cost methods of antenna production primarily aim to reduce the cost of
metallization. This might lead to a reduction in conductivity. A systematic study on
the impact of conductivity is presented. The efficiency, gain and bandwidth of
cylindrical wire meander line, dipole, and Yagi-Uda antennas were compared for
materials with conductivities in the range 103 to 109 S/m. In this range, the
absorption efficiency of both the dipole and meander line changed little, however
the conductivity significantly impacts on radiation efficiency and the absorption
cross section of the antennas. From the point of radiation efficiency, the dipole
antenna performance is most robust under decreasing conductivity[2].

Background:
As a special type of DRAs, liquid (such as water and ionic liquid) antennas may
offer some additional benefits in the following aspects[3]: a) conformability, it is
easy to make the antenna to the desired shape which may be hard to achieve using
dielectric or metal; b) re-configurability the operational frequency and bandwidth
may be controlled using the height and width of the liquid stream; c) small RCS
(radar cross section) it can be turned off or drained when not in use; d) easy to
transport especially for a large antenna and e) low-cost, in particular if it is water
or seawater [4].

The interest on seawater antenna has been for a long time but major progress has
only been made recently. David H. Hatch introduced a concept of ILA (Ionic
Liquid Antenna) in 2002. H. Fayad and P. Record published 2 papers on ILA and
Saline-Water Antenna in 2005 and 2006 [5,6], and proposed a seawater antenna. In
2011, Tam et al filed two US patents on electrolytic fluid antenna, which gave the
detailed components of their seawater antenna and explored multiband current
probe feed design [7].

Since water is cheap and easily accessible, also it has a very high permittivity thus
it is a very attractive material for making dielectric antenna. In this paper, two
aspects of water antennas are discussed. Firstly, the relationship between
conductivity and radiation efficiency is investigated. By varying the water
conductivity, the radiation efficiency of the antenna is observed. Then a new
feeding design for the water antenna is proposed. The reflect coefficient, radiation
efficiency and radiation pattern are obtained and evaluated.
The water antenna:
A. The relationship between the conductivity and radiation efficiency.
Seawater has a relative permittivity of 81 and conductivity of 4.7 S/m which has
both dielectric and conductive properties. Without considering the conductivity,
seawater is a kind of dielectric material, has high permittivity and is suitable for
making a dielectric resonator antenna. On the other hand, without concerning the
high permittivity, seawater can be treated as a conductor, the antenna efficiency is
closely linked to the conductivity of the material: normally the higher the
conductivity, the higher the efficiency. Thus a seawater antenna may be viewed as
a combination of two different antennas: a DRA and conducting antenna. This
special feature has motivated the study of this research paper.

Now let us start from a general case. The water is confined in a PVC tube and fed
by coaxial probe, this can be considered as a monopole antenna. The geometry of
water antenna is plot in Fig.1. Let the relative permittivity of water be a fixed value
at 81 and vary the conductivity from 0-107 S/m. In theory, when σ = 0, the
efficiency ηeff should be high; As σ increases, ηeff reduces; When σ goes to infinity
(that is a perfect conducting antenna), η eff should be high again. CST Microwave
Studio has been selected for this investigation.
 Figure 1. Geometry of water antenna

The computed S11 curves and efficiency lines are depicted in Fig. 2(a) and Fig.
2(b), respectively. It is interesting to note that a) when the conductivity is 0.01,
there are many dielectric resonant modes generated in the antenna corresponding to
the troughs in S11 (in dB), especially at higher frequencies; b) When the
conductivity is increased (to such as 1 S/m), these resonant modes are attenuated,
thus the S11 curve becomes much smoother. And c) As predicted, the radiation
efficiency is decreased as the conductivity increases.

Figure 2. (a) S11 in dB vs frequency for conductivity from 0.01 to 1 S/m

When the seawater antenna is treated as a normal conducting antenna, the
simulated S11 curves and efficiency lines are shown in Fig. 3(a) and Fig. 3(b),
respectively. When conductivity varies from 3 10 S/m to 7 10 S/m, the S11
curves are nearly the same with the case of 2 10 S/m.
Fig. 4 shows the relationship between conductivity and efficiency at 2 GHz. The
lowest point is at conductivity of 1.5 10− S/m and the efficiency is 28%. From the
simulation results, we can draw some very interesting conclusions. When
conductivity varies from 0 to 3 10− S/m, the efficiency goes from nearly 100% to
about 80% and the S11 curve shows that it has many resonant frequencies. In this
scenario, the water antenna can be considered as a dielectric resonator antenna.
When the conductivity is between 10-3 S/m and 102 S/m, the antenna is a
combination of dielectric and conducting antennas, the efficiency is below 80%.
When the conductivity is larger than 102 S/m the antenna acts as a conductor
antenna with efficiencies > 80%. The results agree well with the theoretical
analysis.
 B. Seawater Antennas:
In this section, seawater antenna with a relative permittivity of 81 and
conductivity of 4.7 S/m is investigated. A new feed structure is proposed to
maximize its bandwidth. A monopole like coaxial feed is applied. The geometry
of antenna is the same like Fig. 1.

The outer conductor of coaxial feed is substituted by the ground plane. For a 2
GHz antenna, we choose the following parameters: seawater height = 50 mm,
seawater relative permittivity = 81, relative permeability = 1, conductivity = 4.7
S/m, PVC relative permittivity = 4 and relative permeability = 1, PVC tube height
= 200 mm and diameter = 25 mm, and ground plane thickness = 1 mm. The
calculated S11 and efficiency are shown in Fig 5 (a) and (b), respectively. It is
evident that the new design has a very broadband width: from 0.75 to 2.5 GHz for
S11 < -10 dB (the fractional bandwidth >110%), and the efficiency is above 50%
over this frequency range. The radiation pattern of the seawater antenna at 2 GHz
is given in Fig. 6, it is interesting to note that the gain is about 3.1 and the
radiation pattern is slightly different from a conventional monopole antennas with
a square finite ground plane. For different seawater heights, the S11 as a function
of frequency is given in Fig. 7. Again very broadband widths are observed.
From all the simulation results, we can see that the new seawater antenna has a
large bandwidth with a reasonable radiation efficiency. The new feed method
provides a wider bandwidth compared with the traditional one. The operational
frequency and bandwidth can be controlled by tuning the height and width of the
water stream.

CONCLUSION:
In this paper, the water antenna has been investigated. The relationship between
conductivity and radiation efficiency has been carefully studied. Two extreme
cases of water antenna has been examined. A new feed design of seawater is
proposed. The new antenna has an extremely broadband width and exhibits good
performance and has the potential to be made as a broadband tunable or
reconfigurable antenna.

References:
[1] Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data Dielectric resonator
antennas / edited by K.M. Luk and K.W. Leung.p. cm.
[2] The impact of reduced conductivity on the performance of wire antennas
Morteza Shahpari, Member, IEEE, David V. Thiel, Senior Member, IEEE.
[3] Lei Xing, Yi Huang and Yao-Chun ShenDept.'An Investigation of Water
Antennas'. Electrical Engineering and Electronics University of Liverpool.
[4] Huang, Y, Xing, L, Song, C, Wang, S & Elhouni, F 2021, 'Liquid Antennas:
Past, Present and Future', IEEE Open Journal of Antennas and Propagation, vol. 2,
pp. 473-487. [5] Multi-Mode Hybrid Antennas Using Liquid Dielectric Resonator
and Magneto-Electric Dipole Chaoyun Song, Member, IEEE, Elliot L. Bennett,
Jianliang Xiao, and Yi Huang, Senior Member, IEEE.
[6]. Metasurfaced, Broadband and Circularly Polarized Liquid Antennas Using a
Simple Structure Chaoyun Song, Member, IEEE, Elliot L. Bennett, Jianliang Xiao,
Ahmed Alieldin, Kwai-Man Luk, Fellow, IEEE and Yi Huang, Senior Member,
IEEE.
[7]. Daniel W. S. Tam, San Diego, CA (US) Fluid Antenna With Signal Enhancer
.